Creating a ‘Bootiful’ new Visitor Registration System

The time has come to replace the venerable Visitor Registration System that has served the University now for quite some time. In June the team established for the COM011 project, destined to fulfil this task, ran user workshops and collected some 480 ‘user stories’ from interested parties around the University who use the incumbent system. User Stories are the cornerstone of the Agile methodology which has been chosen for the project.

Using Agile will allow the team to adapt to changing requirements and produce an end product that reflects the will of the users. What better way to complement this than by also introducing a new light weight, flexible, development tool that encourages rapid development and prototyping into IS apps technology stack? Spring Boot, (or just ‘Boot’), which was released in April, is the culmination of an effort by the huge Java/Spring community to prove the speed and ease with which Java applications can be created. This technology was showcased, to massive excitement, when it was shown that Boot could deliver an entire running web application in a tweet.

Boot has been used as the basis of the new Visitor Registration project; we now have a framework in our code repository that can be reused by anyone who wants to quickly setup a fully functional web application, with responsive front end, security enabled for various user roles, Rest endpoints, Soap endpoints and backend Oracle integration. And all of this functionality is fully unit and integration tested – in keeping with the goal of Agile that software quality should always be paramount. The new Visitor Registration System, using cutting edge technologies, will hopefully stand the test of time as well as its predecessor.