Broadleaf Interns | Building Blocks

Its been a busy week trying to get everything finished for The Pecan Company. Over the past week I've implemented; both Paypal and Authorize.net, fixed featured products, displayed price when picking product options, many style changes, and other things that at this moment can not recall. Paypal and Authorize.net turned out to be not too fun of implementation, since I was a guinea pig for documentation that needed to be updated, so me going through was the way to find out what needed to be updated. 

                           This is how I felt for the past couple days, since I found out I was giving a demo this week. This was similar to the, the whole, first major college test or first every job interview kind of jitters. What if something goes wrong, or they dont like me. The biggest irrational fears start popping up until, judgement time has come and you must answer. 

This is usually the stress I work best with, some how it keeps me going, and pushes me. Which is nice, because we did run into a few kinks before the demo, that were mostly ironed out. The guys helped out by having me run through the demo with them a couple times and giving me feedback .

                       The Web Site has come a very far, from its original layout. Everything is starting to come together and work, leaving only a small list of items to be handled before it is ready to be live. The Site it self is a testament to my progress with html, java script, and even java, and overall as a programmer. I'm pretty excited about this knowledge of these languages, it allows me to try/achieve things that I would have no clue on starting. I am also very proud with the way the site is turning out, there were some hurdles in the creation of the UI but I got over them. Overall I am proud of what I have done so far.

After pretty big, refactoring from over night, I come to find some things are broken or styles are not being rendered correctly. This was due to a an overhaul in preparation for a major release of the framework. I spent most of the day sifting through the damage and fixing what I could find is wrong. I think at this point though that I have restored Pecan Company to what it was and workable.

First major problem was the fact that i couldn't even get the front page to render, with its styles, turns out the hierarchy of the file system for it had been changed and we had to merge those changes over into our branch of the Heat Clinic. 

This past week has been mostly about editing what we have been working on. I sent over some screens of what we have been putting together, and Pecan Company seems to like the simplicity of the design. That was pretty good news for us, hoping that we wouldn't have to change much, but they did send back some requests and suggestions.

The main thing that i have been working on is choosing product options based on previous selected options. I did find a bug with it, that it wasn't actually adding the product to the cart. I think the biggest challenge on this problem though, is getting the layout to look good, but also be functional. I would honestly sacrifice functionality for user experience. What I mean by that is if i had the choose between, my program doing this really amazing thing but the look and layout are super complicated and not very friendly. I would sacrifice some awesomeness factor so that people could actually use it and feel very comfortable doing so.

         We finished with figuring out populating product options based upon an option selected, rather than showing to the user all possible combinations of the product and its options. This posed many issues that we had slowly worked through, such as how client and server side interact, how we can use objects upon a html page, and learning a bit of Thyme leaf.

Next thing to work on is drop down menus for the navigation. This shouldn't take very much time, basically we have two options. First one being that we look at pre existing implementations of a drop down menu and use that for our own. The second being that we just make one from scratch in the even most the of implementations are mostly custom design. 

                                  The Pecan Company project is starting to sprout, and becoming more. Right now it is still in the early stages of planning the layout and build but it is slowly growing. 

Today we mapped out, what we though was a comfortable and logical navigation page. With general headers that then will have drop down menus for further defined items, navigation between pages should be a smooth and fluid experience. Also try to introduce new themes, to better fit with the fluidity of the page, but this depends on  Pecan Company approving these changes. 

I've finished with integration stuff for now and moving on to working on the Demo Site. Within the Demo site I'm working on getting the promotion code application working, which seemed simple enough for me to do. I started out thinking that it should be pretty easy to figure out, well that changed pretty fast. 

First I had to get the Demo running locally, I some how crashed it hard enough that it caused me to not access the home page of it. Eventually that was figured out and then I was on my way.

The more I looked into understanding the task, the more overwhelmed I felt. I still have a lot to learn about this framework, especially with the interaction between Web and Java. I had to crack the code that is JavaScript and JQuery (haha), after figuring out what had to be done first so I could actually see results. For right now I am sending requests and now I have handle those requests. So that will cause me to start jungling in the framework, but I am making progress. 

I recently revisited the Google Product Feed project, and that went way smoother than the first attempt. This iteration of it is just going to return a CSV file, then will be fed into Google, rather than using an RSS feed to update product information. Now that this is finished i have moved on to UPS World Ship.

The World Ship process seems pretty straight forward, place data into appropriate fields and format to CSV specifications, and load into the World Ship software. I will be using the Keyed import option, which uses a ODBC mapping to populate fields using a unique id. Pretty easy and simple to use. Though i'm stuck deciphering how a couple of the fields are populated, which are all about shipping options and specific codes they have.

I've noticed that the interns, Clay and I, have been tossed almost instantly into the deep end of the pool, when it comes to work. It isn't the deepest part of the pool but the challenge is still interesting.

I do like the pace that I have started at though, there is a learning curve but not too steep as far as getting to know the frame work. I feel that I can learn better this way, being under pressure, and getting used to the demands. It has been an enjoyable experience so far and looking forward to more as the summer progresses.

The QuickBooks integration is done and being reviewed, so my next task is back to Google Products. This time around though Google Products isn't going to put up as tuff as a fight as it did before, for now a tab delimited format will work, but later the RSS feed will be used instead. I look forward to revisiting the RSS feed, as had learned a great deal from it already.

I should be finishing up with integration for Google Product Feed and QuickBooks with in the next few days. Though I've ran into some trouble with the GPF, I have moved on to the QuickBooks side of things and will revisit the GPF generator after further investigation. I suspect that I will have to create my own schema in order to get what I need/want for the GPF formatting. I've been referencing IBM and w3chools documentation on JAXB and XSD, which have been insightful.

QuickBooks so far has been a smoother process than that of GPF. Since Google has been a much greater challenge, I've enjoyed puzzling through that information more than QuickBooks.

I also have been trying to think of ways to make the Tumblr look better, I am going to try to update its layout later this week.

The following series of posts are written by Trevor Leffert, an intern at Broadleaf Commerce, documenting a web development project. It's an inside look into working at Broadleaf & our eCommerce framework.

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It isn't my job to figure that one out, but it is my job as an intern at Broadleaf Commerce to build the Millican Pecan Company store on our platform.  The Pecan Company, located in San saba, Texas, sells pecans and related items.  We will be enhancing their store capabilities with the Broadleaf Commerce framework.

The first thing I'm tackling is a Google Product Feed generator.  This proved to be a headache at first, since this is the first time that I've actually had the chance to peek under the hood of the BLC framework.  Eventually I found the XSD for the Product feed, used JAXB to generate the classes and now I'm well on my way to finish the conversion from the BLC classes (like Product and Category) into the classes that Google needs (like ItemType).