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We made the decision to use django mostly because of its learnability - none of us had experience making a web server, and we were impressed with the quality of django's tutorials and documentation. Our TA mentioned at our GR5 meeting that django was less good than some other options for plugging into a preexisting partial implementation; we can't speak to other options, but we did spend a lot of time rewriting in server-side python features that already existed in client-side HTML and javascript. The implementation we wound up with, static pages that hit various URLs to get the data they need to display, feels a bit piecemeal; it might have been more elegant had we written everything with django to begin with, learned to use its rendering feature, and constructed pages entirely on the server side.
Evaluation
For our user tests, we provided the following briefing:
We're SitterPlan and our goal is to help babysitters and parents coordinate their schedules to find optimal times for babysitting jobs. Our site allows for two type of users - parents and babysitters - who will each see a different view of the site. Parents can use the site to specify times that they'd like a sitter, and babysitters can use the site to look for jobs.
And tasks:
From the babysitter interface:
- Find an available job and apply for it
- You are willing to babysit between 5pm and midnight every day except Friday. Update your schedule accordingly.
From the parent interface:
-You want to hire a sitter for either Friday or Saturday 7-10PM so you can go to the movies. Make a posting for this job.
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