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Unit 5 Project Intro

Welcome to the Unit 5 Project. This project is a starting point that you'll be making extensive changes to as you design and build your own application. The code provided here is a starting point meant to remind you of patterns that we've been using, as well as show you a few new patterns that you might find useful. This document has 2 main sections:

  • Deliverables
  • Infrastructure

NOTE: There's a lot to this project, so we've split out the more tactical "how to" guidance into a separate README that you'll want to review and follow the included instructions for after you read through this one.

Deliverables

These are the required deliverables/reviews that you and your team will need to create during the project. The status of each of these will be tracked in the GitHub project that your team is using.

Team Deliverables

  • Design Document: Problem Statement Your team’s technical design specification. Complete this template. This should explain the product you'll be creating and what problem it solves.
  • Design Document: Peer Team Review Another team will review your technical design to help improve it. Each team will review at least one other teams design.
  • Design Document: Instructor Review One of the instructors will review your technical design after you've created it and reviewed it with another team.
  • Team Charter: Statements of how your team will work to ensure constructive collaboration, fairness, that everyone is learning and contributing. Complete this template.
  • Working Product: Your project, as a working website deployed to AWS.
  • Team Reflection: A final retrospective with a few questions to answer as a team to reflect on what you have accomplished and learned throughout the project. Complete this template.

Individual Deliverables

  • Accomplishment Tracking: You'll be keeping a log of your individual accomplishments and lessons learned throughout this project week-by-week. Keeping a high-level record of your accomplishments throughout your career is useful for your career growth and promotion. Use this template as a starting point, but you can keep this log in whatever tool/location you'd like.

Technical Learning Objectives

This project is very open-ended,and you/your team will be doing a lot of creative thinking to decide what you want to build. That said,there are several technical learning objectives that each team must meet. You should review the Technical Learning Objectives as you familiarize yourself with the project. As part of the team reflection/ retrospective, you'll fill out this document with your team to document how you met the different objectives.

Project Starter Infrastructure

Your team has been provided with a website, hosted by CloudFront, that talks to an Amazon API Gateway endpoint. (A web front-end is likely new for several of you, as your unit projects so far have been all service development.) The Amazon API Gateway connects to a Lambda service, which stores its data in DynamoDB, an architecture that we’ve used several times on unit projects so far. The starter code provided contains a website that uses the playlist service you created in Unit 3. Below, Image 1 describes the architecture of the starter project.

Image 1: The architecture of your starter project

Image 1: Architecture diagram for the starter project

Introduction to the Starter Code

Unlike our unit projects in the past, this project will have two code bases.

One code base will be for your Lambda service code, similar to what we’ve seen previously. This will contain code that designs and runs your service APIs, as well as packages to interact with and test your service.

The second code base will contain code for your website:

  • HTML: The content of your web pages
  • CSS: The styling and formatting of your web pages
  • JavaScript: The code that runs when a user interacts with the web pages, some of which triggers the browser to send requests to the service

Frequent times these are separated into different repositories, but for simplicity’s sake we've kept them in the same repository for this project.

Delve into the website code with a comprehensive breakdown by referring to the website blueprint. This document provides a detailed exploration of the project's structure, architecture, and key components, helping you better understand the codebase and its organization.

Both of these should be considered starting points/example code. You will end up removing/replacing all of it as you build your own project.

User Authentication With Cognito

We're using AWS Cognito to manage our user authentication. You won't have to do a lot with it, but you should know it's there. As you move through the different setup steps, you'll choose a name for your "Cognito Domain" based on your project, and the SAM/CloudFormation template should handle the rest.

The first time that you log in to your application (or if you ever have to delete and redeploy the whole CloudFormation stack), you'll need to click the "Sign up" link in the login prompt. It's likely that you'll end up needing to create multiple test users along the way; we recommend using a plus alias. If your email address is [email protected] you can create a Cognito account using the email [email protected], and then later create another account using the email [email protected].

Deploying

We'll be using GitHub Actions to deploy the code to AWS. One of the first tasks that you'll do as a team is to configure the repository for this. Once that's completed, your code should build and deploy as described in the next README.

AWS Resources

Each team has one AWS account they will share to deploy their website and service. This is where all of your changes will be merged together and visible. Your team's account will be named something like SE_Unit_5_Group_TEAMNAME and will be available for you to configure like you've done in previous units.

Your website!

To access your website, you'll need to build it first. The next README has instructions on the different ways we'll be doing this.

How Your Website Works

Creating each page of your website requires a surprising number of interactions between different JavaScript files and between our frontend and our backend. Our view playlist page makes 3 separate calls to our MusicPlaylistService.

Let’s look at one piece - adding the header to our page. This requires the full end to end flow of HTML to JS to backend service all the way back to updating our HTML.

Image 2: The end to end flow of HTML to JS to the backend service, and the return to HTML.

Image 2: The end to end flow of HTML to JS to the backend service, and the return to HTML

Two important things to call out:

  1. To call our backend, we are always going through our MusicPlaylistClient.
  2. The DataStore uses a different pattern than we’ve seen previously. It has two member variables - the state, which is a JavaScript object that should hold all the data being used across a webpage, and a list of listeners. The listeners are methods in other objects. Anytime set or setState is called it loops through all of those methods and executes each one. So in each of those listeners, the first thing we do is check to see if the data that they rely on is null. Then, if it’s not null, we update the html to reflect the new data. You can take a look at the addPlaylistToPage() method in viewPlaylist.js for an example of this.

TIP: There's a lot to take in here. The website blueprint we linked to earlier is a good resource to refer back to as you work through everything here.

Project Setup

This document has provided an overview of the project as a whole. For more specifics on how to configure the project and your GitHub repo/AWS account, continue by reading README-SETUP.md.