Main-Projects

Overview

A real, web-based commercial web site to sell movies.

Stack

Frontend

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, BootStrap, dataSource

Backend

Tomcat server, Java, mySQL, Maven

Description

Goals of this project: To learn modern data management techniques including database connectivity, Web application development, extending database functions, database administration, and XML.
Functionality of Website

• Be able to search for movies based on movie title, directors stars name, and year
• Add a movie to shopping cart and checkout
• User should be able to and must be logged in order to use Website
• Employee's should be able to login and Insert movies into database
• Results returned from search results should are paginated, limited to 10 results per page
• Full Text, Fuzzy Search, and Predictive Text functionality for search bar
• Secure with https and encrypted passwords

What did I do?
I created the basic structure and functionality of getting data from the database and displaying those results in a readable format to users. I created SQL queries to find the top 20 movies in the database according to its ranking. I took form values entered from the user to search for movies based on either 4 criteria: title, year, directors, and stars. From these values I returned as a JSON object to the frontend information such as: title, year, directors, and stars. I then parsed the JSON object on the front-end and displayed the following information in a table. I found that performance for searching for the data was quite slow, therefore I attempted to speedup performances by adding indexes on attributes that were searched quite often in the database. That sped up our performance quite a bit. Moreover, I developed mySQL procedures for adding movies the database considering whether the movie is a duplicate or not, and taking appropiate actions. I called the procedures on our backend Java Servlets. Moreover, I developed an android application to perform similar searching functionality as our website. I then proceeded to secure our website by encrypting our passwords using a java program developed and open sourced on github. I realized that our web application were vulnerable to SQL injections since we used the users search values in our queries. I proceeded to fix this issue by using preparedStatements to execute our queries instead of regular statements.
What did I learn?
This project was a real eye opener for me in terms of how the web worked, and just a new of developing in general. Before, this project I was used to lower level languages such as C and C++ and implementing things from scratch for educational purposes. Diving into this project I learned to be able to learn fast, read documentation fast, and to be able to figure our and use a variety of tools that have already been implemented and to integrate them into my application in order to save time. I learned how the web cycle worked from the client (browser) making a request to server (tomcat) and how Java Servlets served these requests, often by retrieving data from our database (mySQL) and to send a respone back, which the frontend would handle. I learned about seperation of concern and just simply learned a plethora of tools and technologies!
What was my favorite part?
My favorite part was just feeling overwhelmed but slowly taking each step and seeing our web application grow into something that was real and useable!

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