My e-commerce website, Nomimonz, sells a variety of Japanese drinks, including soda or carbonated drinks, juices, and tea drinks.
Unfortunately, although I am able to store user-selected quantities into a session, at the time I’m writing this essay, I am still unable to generate the quantities and respective product information onto the shopping cart page. Because of this, I am also unable to properly generate the invoice for selected quantities. I tried to work around this and fulfill any requirements that I could, but overall, my store is quite lacking at the moment. :^(
To make up for the lack of shopping cart functionality, I put a lot of effort into the personalization and persisting logged-in status requirements for Assignment 3. I guess that I can say that I am proud of the design of the website, especially the login and registration pages. At the same time, I wish I could have added more to the design, as well as additional features like a search bar and a drop-down navigation bar.
I’m least happy with the fact that I was not able to implement a working shopping cart. Although we have reached the deadline for Assignment 3, I plan to continue working on developing undeveloped aspects of my site during the break, as it doesn’t feel good leaving things unfinished.
Although I mentioned the unfamiliarity that came with doing Assignment 2 in my last reflection essay, I felt much more lost while doing this assignment. I can assume that it’s because at the time of starting Assignment 3, I still was not entirely grasping the use of cookies and sessions, as well as how they can be applied to the requirements we needed to fulfill.
When I ran into a problem, I tended to trace back my steps to see if I could identify the issue. If I couldn’t fix the problem right away on my own, I would rely on the Assignment 3 examples, the internet, and ChatGPT to help me. For the first time this semester, I went for one-on-one help with Professor Port, as I needed a start on using sessions for the shopping cart.
I was able to implement cookies and sessions for logged-in status persistence and personalization, which was more convenient than passing data through the URL parameters.
I think that ultimately, not fully understanding how to implement cookies and sessions came to bite me, especially when trying to get the shopping cart to function. Looking back, I think I sort of underestimated the difficulty of Assignment 3 after experiencing the first two assignments, which was definitely a mistake. The process of using cookies and sessions seemed simple, however, I struggled with having a clear vision on how I wanted to implement them into the functionality of my store.
Overall, this assignment was a huge wake-up call for me to review the basic fundamental concepts of programming, as most of the time, I felt so stuck in place and unable to think of appropriate lines of code that would help me with my problem. I’m quite the slow learner, so I think that in my own time (summer break), I will need to refine my skills and relearn a lot of the concepts we covered this semester. But from this assignment specifically, I have learned about cookies and sessions, especially setting and retrieving cookies.
If I could go back in time and do things differently, I would have definitely started sooner. The week that Assignment 3 was assigned just so happened to be the busiest week of the semester for me, where I had a final exam and two presentations to prepare for. Even if I did not have the time to actually start the assignment itself, I really wish I spent more time trying to understand the cookies and sessions lab, as this would have made my progress a lot smoother.
For Assignment 3, I would say I spent 30% of the time thinking, 15% writing code, and 55% of the time testing and debugging. I would sit for hours trying to backtrack and fix my errors, so debugging ate up a lot of my time.
I did not work in a team.