Wonderland Designs - Web Shop

Phase 1: December 2015 till January 2016
Phase 2: June 2018 till July 2018
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Management Summary

Phase 1: Spring MVC 3.0

In order to expand the client base of a small millinery business, a web shop was devised to enable online sales with a special focus on exposure in countries outside of Belgium. The items on sale are handmade hats and other headwear targeted at both a girly clientele as well as more upscale evening wear. Since this is a small startup business, a focus was put on affordability in creating and maintaining the solution, to be hosted on rented servers by the company.

Wonderland Designs Web Shop (screen shot)
Wonderland Designs Web Shop (screen shot)

As the focus was affordability, the architectural choices were mostly taken in lieu of previous experience with technologies, albeit in their most recent incarnation. The solution was therefore built on a Spring MVC 4 library, with JSP rendering for the pages in to be shown in the supported browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Chrome, Apple Safari), Hibernate to serve as ORM technology, and a MySQL database. The application was hosted on a Tomcat 7 server to have a small footprint on the resources of the servers hosting the application.

Phase 2: Spring Boot 2.0

Technical debt is a real issue for most applications that have a somewhat longer lifespan. If their development cycle is slow, and not warranting the overhead of a full-fledged micro services approach, the need of occasional adaptations can steadily increase over the years. In light of the advances made in the Spring ecosystem, and the possibilities it opens up, the business owner of the Wonderland Designs web shop decided to invest in an upgrade of the Spring 3 application to the newest member of the Spring family: Spring Boot 2. The executed technical transformations are described here.

Team Composition

Wanting to get my hands on the code in order to keep up my developer skills and keep in touch with what was happening in the Java and Spring world, I was the sole member of the one-man-team, with the owner of the startup in direct contact with myself to develop the needed solution in a very agile way.

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