Development of a contemporary service-based website for diet and activity tracking

Luka Žabkar (2011) Development of a contemporary service-based website for diet and activity tracking. EngD thesis.

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Abstract

Improper, excessive and unhealthy nutrition habits in the western world adversely affect the health and well-being of the general population, while also straining national health budgets due to increased need for medical interventions. Thus, we developed a contemporary website, offering its users services such as diet tracking, activity logging and nutrition information lookup. In the thesis we presented the state of the website market, commonly used technologies and techniques in website development, and contemporary customer expectations. By conveying the concept of Web 2.0, we demonstrated the importance of user generated content and the applicability of integrating the social network Facebook with our website. We also focus on mobile device accessibility and use of customized interfaces, security in web applications and the use of search engine optimization techniques. We demonstrated the technologies utilized and the arguments for integrating various libraries and services. AJAX techniques allowed us to enrich the graphical user interface and elevate the user experience to the level of rich contemporary websites. By delving into the details of our data model, we exhibited most objects used to model our system. We continued by establishing that object oriented programming in PHP is a favorable choice when developing complex websites and preferred to procedural programming when implementing design patterns. While developing our system we affirmed the importance of security and integrity maintenance in multiuser website environments. During the development process much attention was dedicated to open solutions and expandability, such as employing semantic web meta-tags. We concluded that the developed website is appropriately coded for further development and achieves set objectives.

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