August 28 2022
I study Information Systems at UFMG - Brazil. During mid term, I finally started to develop a web app that I've been planning for quite some time. I am vegan, and I find it difficult when I go shopping at the supermarket. I try to buy food from companies that do not explore animals, but gathering this information for every product can be time consuming and exhausting. So I found out that there is a vegan list on internet that is already comprised with a list of products made by manufacturers that do not exploit animals. However, I find it difficult to search for products on this list, because when I search on the vegan list, which is a pdf, I am getting results from the whole pdf, and content from product name, manufacturer name and product's note are within these results. Also, the results are scattered in different pages. Additionally, the list is not being constantly updated anymore, so I thought about helping simplifying the maintenance process too. I tried but couldn't find a web or mobile application that allows me to search for vegan products, so I thought that maybe one day I could help leverage a solution. I thought that a web application would be ideal to simplify the search for vegan products.
First of all, this web app was originally meant to be a progressive web application (PWA). It was so, because I could mimic the usage as I'd do searching the pdf, that is, any user could search offline - by installing the PWA as an application. I did create a functional prototype, but it's been unmaintained for a while.
So at the end of my academic term, I decided not to go back to PWA development, and instead, I started to use Django. Some reasons that counted in favor are that Django provides an admin interface that enables fast addition/removals of content from the database, it is safe, scalable, it uses Python, and many other reasons. But this choice has cost me extra efforts. First of all, aside of PWA, I have never created a web application and I have never used Django, Flask or similar. So I had to learn Django by practicing, which I did by following Django official tutorial, then doing a small project by myself, to get more used to this tool.
When I started to plan all the fine details about my application, one of the first things I have worried about was how I would set Object Relational Model (ORM). That led me to some particularities from creating DB schemas to Django intrinsic functionalities. More information about this will be given on my second post. Then I started to think about how I would serve my web application. I had never deployed an application to the cloud, so I was completely lost. I'll talk more about it on a third post. Later on, I got myself wondering about how I would scale this web application? How I would enable concurrency? How many users would the application be able to serve. These questions led me to look for answers, that I'd share more in a fourth blog post.