Friday, September 24, 2010

Major Goals Realized for Game Price Drop


Good news for the Game Price Drop project. All major features have officially been implemented. It has a lot to be smoothed out but, on the whole, that it's gotten this far is a big deal.

First off, the dataset has expanded considerably. The MySQL database now includes Images, link, and release date information. Also migrated in from the web service world is information on Xbox 360 and Wii titles. The Gamepro API served as a resource for review data that also sits in the database. Efforts expanded the Python code base considerably making it ripe for some refactoring.

The application has a working web front end. The server side of it is PHP based with some front end scripting done in JQuery. JQuery is an easy Javascript library to pick up. Going from knowing nothing to having an Ajax front end with image transition effects is a testament to the quality of work the developers put into this library.

The project has seen environment changes too. It was born on Vista with Xampp serving as the Apache server. Everything now sits in Linux and runs on that Apache now. Also added to the development process was version control.  Mercurial brought peace of mind into the project. Using a VCS based on a distributed repository model made sense.  There's nothing to the project that needs the central server that subversion or cvs would require.

Overall, this has evolved into an interesting end-to-end development project. There is plenty of work to do for refining this project. It's difficult to say when or if this will go live on the web. Making it fit for public usage, though, is a worthwhile goal.

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