Web Development project for university:

Anon

Hi,

I am in the planning stages for my final year project in a Computing Science degree at University.

My main interest is web development and at the moment I am trying to decide which technology route I should take to implement the project. I have heard that PHP is easier to learn so I am going to use it (unless anyone can give me reasons not to!)

The project suggested by my supervisor is for an online booking system for a cinema.

I have worked out some rough details for this as a sort of development sepc (what it should do etc)

Users have to sign up and log in with password and username

They will be presented with a graphical view of the cinema seating plan

they can click on a seat, this will bring up a form to fill in to book that seat

this form will include credit card info etc (this wont need to actually work as it is for a uni project)

Once the user books the seat they will get an e-mail telling them which seat they have booked, for which film, seat number and at what time the film is on and what screen etc

There will be a "My Bookings" area where the user can edit, delete etc his/her bookings at any time

Once the time and date of the booking has elapsed the seat will become available for booking again

Once a seat is booked, when someone logs onto the page a different graphic of that seat will be displayed with a different image....this can be selectable and bookable for a different date

Anyone else have any ideas what could be included in this?

I would really really appreciate any help from people on this. I am a novice with PHP but have some Java experience so I think I can pick it up....and we have a uni library full of books on PHP

Basically, I want someone to help me out with some practical advice on how to undertake the project, any code ideas, any ideas for functions for the site that I may have left out. This is a very important part of my degree program and is worth a lot of marks so I need to get it right!

Any help/advice at all is appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Martin

tomhath

As with any project, first you need to work out the "what". Decide what the booking system will do and what it won't do. Nail down the requirements before you start any design. That's harder than it sounds, everyone wants to jump right to a solution before they have defined the problem.

Your design should always allow for crazy users. What if someone wants to book three hundred seats? And then decides to move half of them to the next night?

After you are sure you have the "what", work out the "how". Design, language, database, etc. The biggest goof ups happen when someone designs a system before they really know what it's supposed to do.

Anon

A very interesting and challending project!It is very, very practical.
I was thinking you probably wanna stress the kind of fields you will need to use, e.g first and last name, email address etc. You also wanna add stuff provisioning discout for college students or for special occassions like Valentines day or X-mas time. You also wanna give your customers a choice to know what movies are coming up and how in advance are they coming.

Also you wanna include options for more than one kind of movie theater since it is web based.

Wish you success

Ndede, MG

Anon

PHP is easy as you don't have to declare a variable as integer, string etc. etc. I also developed a movie ticket booking system for a site.

gite_ashish

You have really selected a good project !

For "graphical view of the cinema seating plan", you can use flash. From PHP manual also check "Shockwave Flash functions" - PHP offers the ability to create Shockwave Flash files via Paul Haeberli's libswf module.

Possible features:

=> Search facility on the basis of
movie name,
movie language,
theater name,
artist / director name
etc.

But before starting any kind of codeing, do through analysis followed by proper design of database, program flow etc.

You can go for MySQL database server.

All the best for your Project.

Martin Crumlish wrote:

Hi,

I am in the planning stages for my final year project in a Computing Science degree at University.

The project suggested by my supervisor is for an online booking system for a cinema.

I have worked out some rough details for this as a sort of development sepc (what it should do etc)

Users have to sign up and log in with password and username

They will be presented with a graphical view of the cinema seating plan

they can click on a seat, this will bring up a form to fill in to book that seat

this form will include credit card info etc (this wont need to actually work as it is for a uni project)

Once the user books the seat they will get an e-mail telling them which seat they have booked, for which film,....

fintan

hi!

Sounds interesting!

I've just done a similar system - a hotel booking system, so the problems should be similar.

Just one thing I noticed. You said someone can click on a seat to order it... Does that mean they have to click on 10 seats to order 10 seats? That could be annoying from a user persepctive...

You're main problem, and about 85% code will be input-validation. It's a b*tch, but has to be done. Assume your writing this for idiots. Try and break it! Cos somebody will anyway... :-)

The best resource for php, after you've learnt the basics, I found, was www.php.net - use the search facility for functions and other things you think might exist... and they also have a downloadable windows help file...

Have fun anyway...
Fintan

Anon

Seeing as most users are raving lunatics, I would take tomhath's suggestion to heart. Getting in the habit of designing a app to handle to most bizzare requests well is invaluable.

Anon

Thats college work? Heck I am doing something like that in my High School! Although its just for fun but its for a small town with many businesses. But basically the same thing. If you need any help I ask here all the time. People on this forum are more than friendly and willing to help. If you need any help then feel free to contact me by E-Mail and I will be more than happy to help you out with it. I am going to be starting college in July at Devry. But I am going into Computer Engineering. 🙂 I like to make the "New Stuff", ya know? Ok talk to everyone later. Someone see my real easy question earlier. Thanks!
Chad R. Smith
www.designcmc.com
E-Mail: Chad@designcmc.com

Anon

Hi,

Its pretty cool that you get to do this sort of stuff at high school 🙂

I would appreciate any help or any code snippets, functionality etc you have developed for your own project. These would halp me to learn what I need for my own project.

Thanks for your replies everyone...keep em coming 🙂

I am taking it all on board and its all been very useful so far.

Thanks,
Martin