Refactoring Meteorology's Online Weather Center
Faculty Sponsor
Nick Rosasco
College
Arts and Sciences
Discipline(s)
Computer and Information Sciences
ORCID Identifier(s)
Chris Zeniecki, 0000-0002-1895-3577; Dusten Knull, 0000-0003-3278-2855; Colin Braun, 0000-0002-1788-7061;
Presentation Type
Poster Presentation
Symposium Date
Spring 2019
Abstract
The Valparaiso University Meteorology Department uses their own website to display radar and satellite image data as well as data from files students collect and generate. While the clickable menus and controllable animated image loops make this site functional and easily accessible, the design and layout of the current site is very inconsistent with the main Valparaiso website. Challenges faced when the project began, we attempted to breakdown the legacy code for the formatting of the home Valparaiso website, which included very unorganized style sheets and extraneous unused code. Also, some of the underlying functions in their current state are difficult to maintain and expand upon. We looked at multiple alternatives to fix the site’s underlying structure, mostly three modern web frameworks known as Rails, Spring Boot, and Django. The final choice was to utilize Django to restructure the site, because of how lightweight it is and because it is written primarily in Python, a versatile programming language that both our group and the Meteorology department had experience with. By providing a new back end using the Django web framework, the website now has clean, reusable, and easily understandable code that is built in modules with potential for ease of expansion. This was accomplished by identifying individual web pages as Django miniature applications, which represent sub-components of the website, and by making heavy use of the template generation engine provided by Django, which has allowed the front-end to also be easily reusable as well as being much more lightweight.
Recommended Citation
Zenieck, Chris; Knull, Dusten; and Braun, Colin, "Refactoring Meteorology's Online Weather Center" (2019). Symposium on Undergraduate Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE). 819.
https://scholar.valpo.edu/cus/819
PDF of Submitted Poster
Finished Poster-1.pptx (2490 kB)
PPTX of Submitted Poster
Biographical Information about Author(s)
Chris Zeniecki, A Junior CIS major with a background in Python and C with an extensive background in HTML and CSS.
Dusten Knull, a hard-worker with as strong background in Python as well as a fair amount of experience with web development (HTML and CSS)
Colin Braun, a resident Crystal Lake, IL and I'm a Computer Science major taking CS-358