Development
There are a lot of ways to develop software, there are development life cycles that are studied in classes, and written and rewritten in books. Usually they go something like this (I took this from the Wikipedia page: Systems_Development_Life_Cycle):
Initiation/Planning -> Requirements Gatherings And Analysis -> Design -> Build or Coding -> Testing -> Operations and Maintenance -> then back to Initiation/Planning.
I, and I think a lot of developers out there, would much rather skip to the coding than spend hours and hours planning and writing pseudo code and gathering requirement and so on. And that is how this project has come to be. We were given some simple and vague requirements: make a better campus map, I’ll spare you from the ranting about the old one, other than to say it wasn’t to much of a challenge.
The obvious pitfall of this type of development is that things often have to be redone/reworked, but on the other hand I can technically call each rework an “iteration of the life cycle” and I’m safe from the academics. Honestly though, we may have gone through several versions of the way we are using GML, but each time we learned something new that improved functionality and our understanding of the nature of the beast.
One of the things I like best about this form of development is that i can start tinkering on day one, and a product appears quickly, it is of course in a very ‘alpha’ state but there is something to show, and I like that kind of instant gratification.
As one last note, I will say that we reworked the database schema several times, attempting to arrive at a solution that would work the best for our needs, and I think as of today we are finally there! it took a lot of code rewriting and polishing but at this point, through each iteration, the code is better and more efficient and our database is designed to allow for maximum flexibility as well as being tuned to make getting the data we need easy and fast.