SMLP Evaluation

When I found out the SMLP was to be one of our first assignments upon starting the second year, I was a little daunted by it. This was mostly because of the problems I had last year with XHTML and CSS, which made me think I might struggle with PHP. I was also unsure about whether I was ready to write the criteria for my own assignment.

However, writing the criteria turned out to be fairly straight forward and I didn’t really have any trouble with this. My main concern was setting myself a realistic task when it came to writing the creative brief. I didn’t want to set myself something too complicated that I wouldn’t be able to get to work before the deadline, but I didn’t want to make it too basic either.

Initially having written the brief I was thinking of simply creating a form that would email orders to the client as an alternative to a shopping cart, but I realised this was perhaps a little too basic and it did not require me to learn MySQL. Therefore I decided to have the form send orders to a database, which is also a more realistic solution in the working world, since it would be more secure, etc.

The site I created is fairly basic and it doesn’t have much content. Realistically there would be a lot more products to choose from, even for a small business. However, I didn’t want to spend too much time finding pictures of dozens of products and trying to align them all in CSS when the main focus of the SMLP was PHP. This is why I went for as few products as possible, and in a real life scenario there would always be the option to add more over time.

Learning PHP went a lot smoother than expected, and I was surprised at how relatively easy I found it. The fact that I learnt some basic VB on the GCE I did prior to this course probably helped, as there are similarities between the two.

While I have a long way to go before I can do anything complex with PHP, I feel I have grasped the basics and this will give me something to build on in the future.

This assignment also seems to have gone a lot smoother in terms of time management when compared to the first year. I have felt a lot more relaxed throughout this unit and haven’t really had anything to stress over as such. I did spend a lot more time than intended on learning PHP and left myself with a lot less time to build the site, but fortunately there were no real problems getting the site to work so this was not a problem.

This could partly be down to the fact that I am not having to work like I was last year, giving me more time to spend on assignments each week, and I think it’s also partly that the work doesn’t seem to be taking quite as long as it did last year. I feel this is a good sign I am improving and my confidence in myself as a coder is building.

I feel the goals I set myself were realistic, and again there were no real problems meeting any of them. The exception to this is possibly the first learning outcome on research into the industry. The forum thread was a good idea, although in practice it unforunately didn’t generate much response.

I did PM some of the members who already work in the industry in the hopes that they could give me an insight into how they use PHP and MySQL. I received a couple of replies just before the deadline, for which I was grateful. I appreciate they are busy people so perhaps it was too much to hope for much response from them. Although perhaps I could have written more in my initial post in the thread. Maybe if I had done this would have generated more response and given people more to talk about rather than the generic posts I received.

Either way, I feel the two replies I did get were helpful despite being brief and it gives me a starting point if I want to do more research into the subject. The fact that I got any replies is a triumph, when it looked like I wasn’t going to get any response throughout most of the assignment.

If I could go back and change anything I would probably choose a better book for my resource list. The book I had chosen turned out not to be ideal for a beginner such as myself, or at least not as a stand alone book. It included many examples of scripts but the explanations provided did not prove very useful, and as I said in my previous reflective post I struggled to connect the use of it to practical examples.

The resource I found most useful was the homeandlearn site which I felt gave good examples of practical uses, i.e. it soon became clear that variables would prove very useful for creating a login feature to a site, where they would store usernames and passwords.

I ran out of time to go through all the tutorials on the homeandlearn site and in future I would like to revisit them and learn how to do some more advanced things with PHP such as creating a forum.

I will also keep practicing PHP, particularly as I will need it for the next assignment after half term.

In summary I feel I have done everything I set out to achieve in the SMLP, even if the site I built was a little basic. However, the title of the SMLP was introductory PHP and MySQL and that is exactly what it was, an introduction. I have gained a good understanding on the basics which I will build on in future to create more advanced PHP driven sites.