Having built a strong backend last week, we spent the majority of this week trying to integrate it with the front end and get a working demo ready. We finished most of the writing of the data to the databases, and so we tried to focus on more niche situations, ones in which the data would have to be inputted by the user in a very specific format. Situations such as creating pools of questions, setting up question types etc. would be examples of such situations.

For the first part of this week, I sat down with Michael from the front end team and we worked on creating the user interface for inputting questions. We decided to use Java servlets to implement the actual application, and we juggled with the idea of using a template engine called freemarker to create the actual UI. We tried working with this idea for a while, but the deeper we went into it, we found that although possible, using freemarker to pass entire objects in and out of the template that we would be showing the user would be highly inefficient and complicated, so we decided to use HTML and some javascript instead to finish this part of the app. As we progressed with building the app without using freemarker, we learned that contrary to what we had previously believed, we didn’t actually need to pass entire objects back and forth to the UI. This belief of ours blocked out a potential path, which we were only able to escape after consulting with Chip about how to progress. From that point onwards, both Michael and I proceeded to thoroughly inspect our possible options before deciding on a way to get what we needed to do done.

I spent the latter part of the week creating a button that was able to upload all sorts of files to the database, as we need to access multiple different file types while creating a quiz to show to our users. This was fairly straightforward, as I had built up a basic understanding of how DynamoDB works, and taking it from there wasn’t a particularly hard job, though I did have to explore a new feature of AWS, called S3.

This week was fun, though we did a lot more troubleshooting than anything else. Next week we will try and have a basic version of the program running, so stay tuned to find out if we are successful!