For this experience, you will work in your team to develop an executable prototype of RadGrad based upon your mockup design. You will have the remainder of the semester to work on this prototype.
To make this experience most useful to you, I want to offer you some options regarding the way you approach it.
This approach suits teams who do not wish to learn any additional technology beyond what they’ve already used. Instead, they choose to focus all of their efforts on building a maximally functional prototype. This path involves:
While this approach will enable your team to make initial progress quickly, it also means that your prototype will not be using current best practices (i.e. Meteor 1.3 and Flow Router). It also means you will not get exposure to new and interesting technologies (ES 6 modules, React, Meteor testing). Finally, there are a variety of small gotchas associated with the use of MaterializeCSS in Meteor (see the readings) that you may or may not encounter and need to overcome.
There is nothing wrong with this approach and staying with your current technology stack. I just want you to be aware of the trade-offs.
This approach suits teams who have an interest in using this month to further upgrade their Javascript and web technology development skills. To do so, your team should select one or more upgrades to your current technology stack to learn through the implementation of your prototype:
In addition, if you wish to avoid the gotchas associated with MaterializeCSS (or if you just want to gain some experience with a different CSS framework that implements material design and which integrates nicely with Meteor), you can try:
Clearly, updating one or more components of your technology stack will slow down the implementation process.
While I could have simply dictated the technology stack for you to use, it is a useful exercise for you to grapple with the question of staying with what you know vs. learning something new.
This is a very common dilemma for professional software developers. I hope that having this experience in the safe confines of a class (where the success of a product or even entire company does not rest on the outcome) proves useful to you.
By the time and date on the Schedule page, your team will make a brief presentation to the class on what adventure you have chosen, and your initial progress.