Inspiration
My team and I built ShoppingCartGo in our final year project as 3rd year students. Our goal was to design and build a full backend relational database, create the frontend for it, and launch it as a web application. The web store Amazon was taking off very quickly during that period, so my teammates and I thought we might as well see if we can make a clone, and see how easy or hard it is to do so.
What it does
ShoppingCartGo is a full Online store system. Users can create their accounts as both sellers and buyers for the site. If users are sellers, they can create their product listings, add their prices and put their listings on the site for buyers to see. Buyers can add their credit card numbers and purchase the products. If they purchase a product, they can leave ratings and feedback for their buying experiences. Alternatively, they can also directly rate their sellers.
How I built it
ShoppingCartGo was built by three 3rd year computer engineering students. My role was the backend guy. Our web application was built using Java and Spring Maven. Our backend code made heavy use of Servlets and strictly adhered to the MVC design. We used MySql and database hosted on AWS to store data and talk to our backend written in Java. On the frontend, our web app is written in html and styled using css.
Challenges I ran into
One of the biggest challenges I ran into is storing states in the webapp. Since we are creating a Java Spring Maven webapp, we follow REST-API design paradigms and expect our webapp to be stateless. However, this is difficult because we needed to store whether users have logged in and other states in our web apps at times.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I am very happy with how our web app turned out. It looks very clean, and is a nice prototype and we have accomplished building the most important features of what is required in a online stores web portal.
What I learned
I learnt both the frontend and backend aspects of building a webapp.
What's next for ShoppingCartGo
Right now, we aren't looking to extend and add features. However, there are many things we can do for ShoppingCartGo. Stress Testing is something we've never done. Payments are done as simple prototypes where we never hooked up with any payment systems or anythings and instead just stored credit cards in the database directly. More work can be done on the frontend as well.
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