Summary

This hour is the first of three hours during which we'll be building an online photo album application from the ground up. When we're beginning any nontrivial project, the first step is always a planning phase. The future success of the project can be predicted by the thoroughness and quality of the planning phase; a project that is insufficiently planned is almost certain to fail.

In software development, this typical design phase is iterative and involves three steps:

1. Collect design requirements from the customer.

2. For applications that need to persist data, implement the database schema necessary to capture the data spelled out in the design requirements.

3. Create mockups of the web application.

In this hour we worked through each of these three stages. In the first stage, the requirements for the photo album application were tersely defined, along with more palatable use cases.

Following that, we turned our attention to creating the database structure needed for this project. In previous database examples, we looked at working with databases with only a single table; however, the photo album application's database is constructed of several, related tables. In this hour we saw how one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationships can be expressed, as well as how to use foreign key constraints to help ensure relational integrity.

This hour concluded with a discussion of the purpose and benefits of creating a mockup of the user interface. With the design phase complete, we're ready to start building our photo album application!