Project Feasibility Question

I am a senior computer information systems student, and I am preparing to begin my senior project next semester. The project will consist of developing a web based application for a small real estate appraisal/consultation company, which will allow them to communicate and conduct business with their customers via the internet. The actual project will begin in November and will have to be completed in late February of next year, but to play it safe, and to ensure that I develop a quality solution that suits my client’s needs I am anxious to begin now.

At this time I have only met with my client once. They provide the majority of their services for real estate sales companies, banks and other business of this nature, but they do also work with individual home owners. We really haven’t gone too far into the details but some basic functionality that we discussed would include the following:

• Allow the creation of new users with password protected accounts
• Allow users to login and place new appraisal orders with the company.
• Allow users to view, update, and delete all orders that they have placed.
• After the order has been fulfilled by the company, they would like the user to be able to view, print, and download the actual appraisal report for each order they may have with the company. This will include a lot of detailed information about the property that was appraised along with photos of the property.
• The administrator should be allowed to view all users, orders etc. and be allowed to remove or make changes to any users, orders etc. and be provided with the capability to search for particular orders, users etc.
• Allow the company to invoice users that have placed orders through the system.
• Allow the company to view statistical information in a report format through the system. This would be general information that is pertinent to the operation of the company. A simple example of this would be how many orders were placed in March? What is the total price of all orders placed through the system in the last year? They would also like to be able to print or download these reports to disk.
• In addition, they want this to act as a general website providing viewers with information about the company and the services that they provide, as well as the means to contact the company in order to request more information.

This is a very rough description, but I think it should provide you with a fairly clear idea of what I am aiming to achieve with this project.

Finally, my questions: Is it feasible to develop the user interface for a system of this nature in Flash? Why not? If so, what should I be concerned about as far as security and protecting the data contained within the system? What scripting languages would work well with Flash to communicate with the database? What database would you recommend that I use with Flash? More questions to follow I’m sure.

Any advice you can offer me will be greatly appreciated. I will be responsible for the design, development, testing and installation of the entire project. I will also be writing all documentation and user manuals to accompany the completed project. Finally, I will be giving a presentation on the entire project in front of a lot of people including the president of my university. A project like this for a student with little to no real world experience is a tad bit overwhelming to say the least, but I am confident in my abilities and I am sure that I can handle it. I would really like to not only complete this project, but to hand over something to my client that I can be proud of.

Thank you very much for your time, and patience

You can use some flash, but your site is basically an e-commerce site. [like i did for my 3rd year project at uni ] . You need to use JSP, ASP or PHP for your interactive elements concerning databases and so forth. I think you can use flash for database interactivity, but its generally not done. You'll need an SQL database which will basically be a set of tables, each of which interacts with the asp/jsp/php according to how you want it.

I would stronly recommend doing the interactions in one of those languages, and doing the non-interactive pages with flash to give it some style.

Using flash for database interactions is on the rise, and macromedia is making a big push for more and more people to use it. The problems that exist now are that the necessary flash components to create these are not yet standard and exist in add-ons that have to be purchased. The good news is once you have them, you don't need asp or php or jsp to interact with the database, flash does it directly. The bad news is it costs around $300 for the flash data connection kit. Check out www.macromedia.com for more details.