Social Networking Web Application Development - Sports Pal - Assignment Example

INTRODUCTION “The Internet has significantly changed the way our society connects with one another, does business, and socializes. Today’s youth has never known a world without the Internet, which is a piece of information adults must put into context when they think about and compare, generationally, social networking to face-to-face communications” (Skills To Pay Bills n.d: 134). Sports Pal is a social networking web application intended to connect the people with their taste of sports. Apart from other general purpose social networking website, Sports Pal can offer its user a more sports and games oriented user experience. The people who share same spirits in sports would find this application as a great place for sharing their experiences, giving and taking advises, organizing events etc. This application will use the latest technology and simple yet elegant user interface. The Application allows it user to search people based on their interest in any sports. Search results could be filtered by location when the area of the operation expands in the future. The application will be developed with HTML5 and JavaScript in the front end and PHP in the server side scripting. Initially MySQL could be used as database client as number of users and frequency of interactions are considered. When future functionalities are introduced and website’s hits will be increasing, a more scalable database client such as Cassandra could be used. In this report we are including a detailed timeline for the development of application, design, structure, implementation details and future development ideas. APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT TIMELINE Timeline 1: For initial 12 week development with a single developer WEEK 1 WEEK 2 WEEK 3 WEEK4 Requirement analysis and finalizing the requirements should be done. Initial system design should be completed. ER diagrams, Use Cases and DFD’s should be drawn and revised Finalize the system design and acquire the tools for the implementations. Make a layout of the websites external view Implementation begins. The front-end forms and layouts should be designed. WEEK 5 WEEK 6 WEEK 7 WEEK 8 The designed view should be converted to HTML document and may be scripted with JavaScript Setup the database and insert sample data to the tables. Basic backend PHP codes will be coded Refine the PHP Code and connect the views, backend codes, and database. Testing should be made After the testing the application should be deployed to the production web server for beta testing. WEEK 9 WEEK 10 WEEK 11 WEEK 12 Branding activities should begin. Prepare leaflets or posters to be distributed in your circle and plan a campaign. Make contract with advertisers Make any revisions needed to the application after beta testing is completed. Test for applications integrity and security. Start a marketing campaign through emails, or from your college etc before launching the app. distribute leaflets to sports clubs in your area. Launch the application by the end of this week after any required design modification are made. Note the user responses and feedbacks for further improvements. Timeline 1: For 18 month development MONTH 1-3 MONTH 4,5,6 MONTH 7 MONTH 8 Initial release of application is done. and details mentioned in Timeline 1. Application will need constant maintenance in the initial phase. No of users should be monitored. Login system should be made more secure. Forums should be monitored. Make a feasibility study on any new functionality planned. Make necessary design diagrams for the new design. Start coding the new design separately for the version 2. MONTH 9 MONTH 10-12 MONTH 13 MONTH 14 Test whether the new feature does not conflict with current one. Divide the development work into two. A new developer could join you in development process. Developer 2should be trained and assigned for the maintenance of present applications Developer 1 should research about new user interface trends that could be included in next version. Developer 2 will study about new updates to the current version. Developer 1 should implement a new database structure in order to accommodate new features. Developer 2 should write front-end codes for the users view. MONTH 15 MONTH 16 MONTH 17 MONTH 18 The Beta testing of the new application should be started after unit testing of all modules. Any revisions arises from the beta testing should be made. Meet more advertisers and start marketing campaign once more. Port the user data of earlier version to database structures of the new version. Porting should not affect the users Launch the Final version of application. LIST OF FEATURES User Registration New users can register to our web application through a signup facility. Users are requested to provide an username and password in order to gain full access to Sports pal .Non registered users can access only the homepage contents. User data is only passed through an encrypted SSL connection (Buttyan n.d.: 1). User Profile. During the registration process Sports pal will collect details such as Full name, Date of Birth, Email address and physical location of the users. These details are displayed in our profile page. User can also update these details even after signing up to our application. These profiles are publicly viewable by all users of the application. Users are requested to add a sport of their interest during signup process and it could be edited in user profile functionality. Post a headline/status message. Users can update their status message logging in to Sports Pal. This is a common featured shared by all social networking websites today. This facility will allow user to publish their feelings or day today happenings in Sports Pal. Search by Sports, Peoples, and location. This is a critical functionality of Sports pal which allow its users to search other users based on their interest. It is through a good search the social networking happens. Users can search peoples based on their locality, sports they like as well as by their name. Add People to the Interest List. This facility powers user to pin the other users to their account. This works similarly to the friend request facility of general purpose social networking. In sports pal this facility could be used to keep in touch with peoples of their interests. Add Sports to the Likes List User can add a limited number of sports items to their Likes list. The number of items that could be added is restricted so that users can only display their true passion in the sports. This would increase the accuracy of search facility. Post in the forums with categories. Users can post their views about a certain category of interests in forums functionality. Newest forum updates related to the sports item in Likes list of user is shown on the welcome page. Categories are predefined and updated by the administrator to ensure that the web application is used solely for the goals it is made of. Irrelevant post can be reviewed and deleted by the web administrator. User can report a forum post to be reviewed by the administrator in case of in-appropriate content. Comment on any posts in the forums. User can comment on any forum posts that are available in forum functionality. Administrator can check the comments and remove the comments if it violates the community standards of Sports Pal. Advertisement Clicks Monitoring. Since Sports Pal is a made available free of cost to its users, the revenue generation mainly depends on the targeted advertisements. Advertisements are shown in the right hand side of the web application. Advertisement could be displayed based on the Likes list of the user. For example advertisement related to tennis bats could be displayed to the users who are interested in that sport. Each time an advertisement is clicked, the website redirects the users to the website of the advertiser and a maintain a record on how many times that was clicked. This will help administrator to generate a reports to the advertiser and charging them. Sports pal can also integrate advertising services such as ‘Google Adwords’ (Google Ads n.d.) APPLICATION DESIGN / ER DIAGRAM “An Entity - relationship model (ERM) is an abstract and conceptual representation of data. ER modelling is a DB modelling method, used to produce a type of conceptual schema of a system. Diagrams created by this process are called ER diagrams” (Crane 2011:2). In Sports pal we consider the following entities apart that of database table. They are user, sports, forum and comments. Only the basic relationships can be established using ER diagrams. The relationship created dynamically through various functions are demonstrated using Use case diagrams or ‘Data Flow Diagrams’ (Donald & Le Vie n.d.: 1). Given below a initial ER diagram for Sports Pal. Rectangle shapes shows the entities, the diamond shapes shows the relationships and bubbles show the properties of the entities. The first entity we are going to discuss is the user. User have several properties such as name, contact details, location, username password and headline. User is related to forums through a post action. Forum is another entity we have identified. It is related to the users as well as to administrator. In this ER diagram we have confined its scope only to user and its relations. Forums have properties such as title content or comment numbers. User is again related to comment entity. Relationship is through the action post comment/Comments. Comments have properties such as comment id and content. Each comment is stored as a separate entity and later related with the post they are commented for, at the run time of application. Administrator has a super role over all these relations and entities. Administrator can change the status of any entity so as to remove it from the applications scope. DATABASE STRUCTURE Sports Pal uses a number of database tables to store the user credentials, activities and advertisements related data. The number of tables determines the complexity of an application. We are using a relational database model. “Relational data model represents the database as a collection of tables, termed relations, each with a unique name. A column of a table represents an attribute.Each value corresponds to an attribute or a field” (Chen 2007: 6). [http://www.cs.nthu.edu.tw/~yishin/Courses/CS4710/Handout/Session3%20-%20Relational%20Model%20Handout.pdf page 3] We are using the following tables: 1. USERCREDENTIALS 2. POSTS 3. COMMENTS 4. SPORTS 5. ADVERTISEMENT The table structure, its usage and data types are explained in detail below. The primary key of each table is prefixed with an asterisk ‘*’ symbol. TABLE: USERCREDENTIAL USERCREDENTIAL table is used for storing the login credentials as well as the profile details of the user. *UID USERNAME PASSWORD FULLNAME DOB CITY COUNTRY EMAIL HEADLINE LIKES INTERESTS ACCOUNT STATUS The “primary key” (n.d.:1) of the table is UID which stands for unique identifier, an auto incremented integer. For each newly signed up user the UID is incremented by the database and no duplications are allowed. USERNAME and the PASSWORD fields are used for storing login related data. Password may not be stored in the password field as it is due to security reasons. So that password is encrypted using MD5 algorithm provided by PHP. ACCOUNTSTATUS field contains the status of the account such as active, blocked, deleted etc. By default ACCOUNTSTATUS is set to active at the time of signup process TABLE: POSTS POSTS table is used for storing the forums post data in Sports Pal. *PID POSTED BY DATETIME CATEGORY TITLE CONTENT COMMENTNO REPORTED POSTSTATUS The primary key of POSTS database is PID which stands for Post Id. It is an auto incremented integer field. Each time a forum post is submitted it is assigned with a unique number. DATETIME is used for storing the timestamp. CATEGORY field is used for storing for which category does the post falls behind. Title of the forum post and Content are separately stored in two fields. No of comments for a post is stored in COMMENTNO. Each time a user clicks report a post the REPORTED field is incremented. POSTSTATUS show whether the post is disabled or active. TABLE: COMMENTS Comments table is used for storing comments made by user for some forum posts. *CID PID POSTEDBY DATETIME COMMENTDATA COMMENTSTATUS CID, which stands for comment id is the primary key of this table.CID is an auto incremented integer value. PID is the Post ID to which the comment belongs to. COMMENTDATA is used for storing the text data of the comment. COMMENTSTATUS is used for storing whether comment is active or deactivated by the administrator. TABLE: SPORTS Table SPORTS is used for storing the sports items by the administrator. The primary key is SPORTSID . *SPORTSID SPORTSNAME DESCRIPTION IMAGEURL NOOFLIKES ITEMSTATUS SPORTSNAME is used for storing name of the item, and brief description of the item may be provided by the administrator in the DESCRIPTION field. The administrator can add an image URL which may be displayed in ‘add sports item’ functionality in IMAGEURL. Number of likes for each item is stored and updated on NOOFLIKES field. The field ITEMSTATUS is used for administrative control over status of the item. TABLE: ADVERTISEMENT Table ADVERTISEMENT is used for the storage of advertisement, advertiser and related data including number of clicks per advertisement. The primary key is ADVTID which is an auto incremented integer. ADVTID ADVERTISOR ADVTCATEGORY ADVTCONTENT REDIRECTLINK NOOFCLICKS ADVTSTATUS Advertiser details are stored in ADVERTISOR fields. ADVTCATEGORY is used for storing comma separated key words related to its content. ADVTCONTENT store the data for advertisement such as HTML codes, Link to external Flash media files etc.In REDIRECTLINK we store the website of the advertiser to which the clicks should redirect to. NOOFCLICKS is used for recording the hits per advertisement.ADVTSTATUS displays whether advertisement is activated or deactivated by the administrator. IMPLEMENTATION Technologies used: HTML 5 “HTML5 is simply a set of new features made available for developing web applications, adding to the existing capabilities we find in HTML4” (McArdle 2011: 3). HTML 5 is the fifth major revision of Hyper Text Markup Language which is used to represent information and documents all across the World Wide Web. HTML 5 has many new features and the new DOM Api provides more tags for semantically arranging a document, as well as to create robust web applications. We are using HTML5 to code our front end views, and used along with JavaScript. JAVASCRIPT Javascript is an object oriented, lightweight scripting language which is executed on browser side, as well in other non browsing environments. it is used for validating the forms, enhancing user experience without disturbing the servers and for styling and manipulating the document object model. “The JavaScript standard is ECMAScript. As of 2012, all modern browsers fully support ECMAScript 5.1. A 6th major revision of the standard is in the works” (Mozilla Developer Network 2014: 1). In our project we are using javascript for enhancing search functionality, validating user generated form before sending to server. Javascript libraries such as JQuery UI are used for generating stylish user interfaces. PHP PHP is executed on the server side and the out may be generated in html, plain text etc which is understood by the browser.PHP is used to connect the forms and databases.SQL queries can be called within the PHP program in order to manipulate the database. “It supports many database management systems available for Unix DBM, MySql Oracle etc” (Internet Computing n.d.: 687). Apart from writing a whole program entirely in PHP, it also used as for scripting inside an html document. For large web applications, developers chose to use any frameworks for PHP such as Laravel, Code Igniter, etc. Using a framework would reduce the effort of building large applications. MYSQL MySQL is currently the most popular open source database server in existence (Tizag n.d.: 3). MySQL is a complete ‘Relational Database Management System [RDBMS]’ (SQL Database Language 2014). In this project we are using MySQL as the database server. Several client software’s such as PHP My Admin etc provide a graphical user interface to the command line operated MySQL. MySQL is used by many real world application and social networking websites combined with other database packages SECURITY & LEGAL CONCERNS Security concerns: As Sports pal is a social networking application based on sports interest, it share the security concerns with all general purpose social networking website. The applications security and its social responsibility should be well defined. As the application collects the details such as user address, email address etc we should have strict policies for protecting the privacy of the user. Application has the responsibility to protect the collect data from data thefts or from hackers. It is very common nowadays, the social networking application gets hacked and user data are exposed to public. “Password hashing is one of the most basic security considerations that must be made when designing any application that accepts passwords from users” (The PHP Group 2014). Sports pal is well aware of these security risks and will opt for good technology and coding standards to avoid security loopholes. The content reporting system will be a great boon in controlling the post and comments which violates the community standards of Sports Pal. Legal concerns: “CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 prohibits the inclusion of deceptive or misleading information and subject headings, requires identifying information such as a return address in email messages, and prohibits sending emails to a recipient after an explicit response that the recipient does not want to continue receiving messages” (What is the CAN-SPAM Act n.d.) The full name is Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003 .Our application should be compliant to this law and should not send marketing messages unless n user wishes so. If the user of the application opts out of the service and request no further communication, application will not send any marketing mails to their collected address. The user details collected by Sports Pal will not be shared with any third party organization so that it may not be misused. It should be complying with UK Data Protection act .The Schedule one of UK Data Protection act clearly states under what circumstances the user’s personal data can be processed or not. It ststes that: “Appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against un authorized or unlawful processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data” ( Data Protection Act 1998 2013: 1) Complying to this , personal data will be processed only for the lawful needs by Sports pal. FUTURE DEVELOPMENT PLAN Sports pal can be extended to a wide network of users all across the globe. In present general purpose social networking websites there are many limitations for sports related relationships. Sports Pal now has the basic features to mingle with peoples and post forms, headlines and comments through their account. In future these operations could be extended and revised so that a much superior user experience can be delivered. As revenue will be generated after the initial launch of application more number of developers can be hired for enhancing the features of Sports Pal. The future functionalities we expect to include in future development of Sports Pal are given below. Facility to create pages for sports clubs. Facility to add photos of the sports events by every user. Facility to add and invite peoples to sports events. A sports calendar based on users interest and events in their locality. Interactive messaging services among the users. Facility to share embedded videos from websites such as YouTube. Along with the functionalities the infrastructure also need to be updated. Several dedicated web servers in different geographical position to be maintained along with datacenters. This will enhance the load balancing of sports pal and helps in redundancy of data. SUMMARY Sports pal can be a great revolutionary web application as this would launched just after London Olympics and Paralympics. This type of social networking will be a new experience for the users and they would love using sports pal along with other general purpose social networking websites. Sports Pal can be great help in planning and execution of events, finding the right peoples to interact with. We believe that application will be accepted by the user if we are proving what they need irrespective of infrastructure we maintain. The physical infrastructure used by initial version of the application is very minimal as number of users will be limited to a city. A clean and elegant design by using latest user interface concepts would be of great appeal. The application have to deal with some security and legal concerns to provide a great service to its users. “A mobile-friendly site” version should also be made in future for targeting smart phones with small screen sizes (Dreamscape Design 2013). The marketing emails should be limited and data protection should be provided as enforced by laws. The advertisements are the revenue for this web application. As revenue rises new developers can be hired so that future versions of Sports Pal could be launched with more extended features and infrastructure. Reference List Anon. (n.d.) ‘A Word About Social Networking.’ Skills To Pay The Bills [online] 134-136. Available from [3 March 2014] Anon. (n.d.) ‘Gloss Over the Key Ideas.’ [online] 1-3. Available from [3 March 2014] Anon. (2013) ‘The Data Protection Principles.’ Data Protection Act 1998 [online] 1-6. Available from [3 March 2014] Buttyan, L. (n.d.) ‘SSL Secure Socket Layer.’ [online] 1-33. Available from [3 March 2014] Chen, Y. S. (2007) ‘Relational Datamodel.’ Introduction to Database System [online] 1-77. Available from [3 March 2014] Crane, M. (2011) ‘Introduction To ER Modelling.’ Introduction To Databases Notes [online] 1- 20. 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Available from < http://www.ebooktrove.com/coding/mysql-tutorial.pdf> [3 March 2014] Tutorials Point (2014) SQL Database Language [online] available from [3 March 2014] The PHP Group (2014) Why Should I Hash Passwords Supplied By Users Of My Application [online] available from < http://www.php.net/manual/en/faq.passwords.php> [3 March 2014] Read More