"Melin: Academic Reference Manager" by Harris Gustafson
 

Level of Education of Students Involved

Undergraduate

Faculty Sponsor

Nicholas Rosasco

College

College of Arts & Sciences (CAS)

Discipline(s)

Computer Science

ORCID Identifier(s)

Harris Gustafson, 0009-0005-2896-3866;

Presentation Type

Poster Presentation

Symposium Date

Spring 4-24-2025

Abstract

Enterprise level applications are notoriously complex to design, implement, and maintain, oftentimes burdened by the intricate nature of enterprise architecture. This project investigated the applicability of enterprise design patterns, drawn from Martin Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, within a simulated enterprise environment, focusing on their impact on complexity and maintainability for a single-person development team. The project, "Melin", a full-stack web application enabling students and faculty to manage academic references (import/export, DOI/ISBN search, manual creation, cloud storage, citation/bibliography generation), was developed over 14 weeks using an iterative Scrum/Kanban approach with 3-week sprint cycles. While implementing the Repository and Unit of Work patterns presented unnecessary complexity, patterns such as the Service Layer, Data Transfer Objects (DTOs), and Model-View-Controller (MVC) demonstrably improved code maintainability and reduced coupling between modules. This project found that while Repository and Unit of Work patterns have their uses in specific situations the modern web application framework oftentimes includes a layer of abstraction that implements one or both of these patterns. Meanwhile other patterns provided significant advantages in terms of code organization and maintainability, even within a solo-development context. These findings suggest that even when enterprise scale solutions are performed by smaller teams, they can still be used to reduce the overall complexity of the application, thus making the longevity of the project longer.

Biographical Information about Author(s)

Harris Gustafson is a senior Computer Science major at Valparaiso University, with plans to pursue a career in software engineering.

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