Case Study

Full Stack Movie Application

28 Dec 2020 Software & Architecture

In this project, I worked in a four-person team to develop a full stack movie application for searching and bookmarking movies from IMDb. The application was designed from scratch with a PostgreSQL database, backend services, and a single-page frontend application.

Project snapshot

Challenge

Design and deliver a full-stack search application with robust backend/data-layer architecture in a team setting.

Constraints

Four-person team with shared responsibilities.
Need both feature delivery and solid database/query design.
Tight project timeline with testing requirements.

Intervention

Designed normalized PostgreSQL schema and ER model for search use cases.
Implemented layered backend architecture with ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework.
Built SPA frontend flows and integrated with secure, paginated REST APIs.

Outcomes

Delivered an end-to-end searchable and bookmarkable movie application.
Implemented advanced query/search functionality with ranking and history tracking.
Applied unit and integration testing across critical service workflows.

In this project, I worked in a four-person team to develop a full stack movie application for searching and bookmarking movies from IMDb. The application was designed from scratch with a PostgreSQL database, a backend system, and a single-page application for the frontend.

Links to the code:
https://github.com/ThomasBonderup/RAWDATA-project-group-1
https://github.com/ThomasBonderup/RAWDATA1-portfolio-subproject-2

Database Design

I contributed to designing a relational database schema for the movie application, including database normalization and entity–relationship (ER) modeling.

Database Functionality

The project included the development of advanced database query functionality, such as searching for movie titles, trigger functions to store user search queries in a search history table, extended search functionality based on title, plot, characters, and actors, exact-match queries using inverted indexes to match intersecting search terms, VARIADIC arrays, and search ranking functionality.

Application Design

The backend system was developed using ASP.NET Core with C#. The architecture followed a layered software architecture, consisting of a Web Service Layer implemented with ASP.NET Core MVC to expose a REST API. This API communicated with a Data Access Layer implemented using Entity Framework, utilizing Data Transfer Objects to persist data in a PostgreSQL database running on a server.

Pagination was added to the REST API along with basic API security through user authentication. Unit tests and integration tests were used extensively throughout the project.

Single Page Application

The movie application was designed as a Single Page Application (SPA), with functionality implemented in JavaScript using the Knockout web framework. Bootstrap was used to provide the user experience and layout.

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