System design

With any system being developed, design is a very important aspect which can make the development process considerably easier and ensures that all user requirements can be met.

Pages of the System & User interface

It is helpful to highlight the necessary pages within a system before beginning development as it makes system development easier and ensures that the system contains all the necessary pages. If the base system is developed and then the other required pages added one by one then problems can arise as the code matures and design problems may arise. From the identified user requirements I can identify the following required pages:

• Index page / User identification
• Error message
• Listing of subscribed news groups
• Listing of known news groups
• Listing of all available news groups
• User preferences
• Listing of articles within a specific news group
• Compose article
• Display article

Database design — KISS

KISS is a well known computing acronym which represents “Keep It Simple Stupid”, meaning that design and implementation of any system should be kept as simple as possible. With this in mind the design of the database to store the user preferences was kept as simple as possible, while still being able to offer the storage required.

The availability of a Perl module named ‘News::Newsrc’, used to “manage newsrc files”, meant it would be beneficial to store a user’s newsrc as a single data element, or in the case of the database table, a field. With this in mind, following table was produced to store a user’s preferences.