Modern UI Design & Implementation For SCP Foundation Web Application Essay.

Frontend Development

Modern UI design and implementation have become part and parcel of web development in the modern world. Good modern UI can mean a turnover for a company with numerous competitors using the latest cutting-edge tools to develop scalable web applications. This report will go through the process used to develop a web application for SCP Foundation. This web application will be used to showcase various aspects of the company. This application also takes into account security measures to protect the information from different pages from unauthorized users.

To bring everything together several technologies were used to bring the project to a fruitful conclusion.

1. React JS – React is a javascript library for building Interactive dynamic user interfaces. React makes everything painless to create interactive user interfaces. The thing that makes react an interesting language for most developers to use to build user interfaces is that you can design simple views for each state in the application, and react can efficiently update and render just the right components when data changes. The declarative nature of React.js makes the code easy to predict and debug. Reactjs is a component-based language that can manage its state and then compose these components to make complex UIs. Since the component logic is written in Javascript, instead of templates, you can easily pass rich data through the app and keep the state out of the DOM. The backend of this application is based on React but later you will find out that another framework popularly known as Next JS which is React Utility tool based on React is used to help with a certain vital function in the modern web development framework.
2. Next JS – Next.js is a react framework that can be used to solve some problems that plain react causes. These problems cannot be ignored because at the end of the web app development phase, the product should be able to run reliably fast and have a good  SEO ranking. SEO ranking is very important for marketing and getting new customers or users to the business website hence expanding business-aware around the globe. This is where the Next.js framework tool comes in to help with features like server-side rendering, reducing the bundle size using webpack. These problems can be solved using plain React.js but it takes effort, with  js these tools come built and are convenient to use. This is why we will also be using Next.js to improve the application performance on the browser on production. With Next.js comes tools like onboard API which is a server-based in NodeJS in the backend to help create data stream APIs.
3. TypeScript – This is a strongly typed language built on top of Javascript which gives a developer strong tooling at any scale. The reason to use Typescript for this project is to get features like syntax highlighting which is very important for fast web development. The way is used here is more of a productivity tool, that our code does not have to run on the server to know which errors exist in our code but with Typescript, you can get these typed errors in real-time and debug the code to solve the problem. It also gives very rich information to help debug with even suggestions sometimes to solve the problem.
4. Prisma – This is a server-side library that helps an application read and write data to the database. This is tool is used as an object relation mapper to map our Prisma schema in the database. This tool also makes life easier for the developer since it handles database creation and data inputs for you.
5. Tailwind CSS – This is a utility first framework packed with classes that can be composed to build any design. With CSS, your style your pages on larger screens first approach while with Tailwind CSS focus is on small devices first building towards larger devices. This approach is convenient for building responsive web applications. The other advantage is that you write all our codes in one with styles in the same file this further can downsize the bundle size. The other thing is that Tailwind CSS comes with a runtime engine for faster execution of styles.

Most of the work in this application went to the front part in particular. The front-end has 6 pages that contain information on various  SCP information.  One of the key aspects of modern web development now is the ability for a web app to be dynamically responsive to different devices running the web app. Tailwind   CSS is a better tool to help in this goal with inline CSS class utilities. The frontend texts come s from a single JSON data file wherein some instances we directly iterate through various JSON objects to produce the display. We have a navigation header across all pages which is a key aspect of the modern web page.

This is the business logic of the application. Since our app doe not involves a lot of data fetching from the database except creating a user, a single API endpoint was required to accomplish signing up users. With Next.js we have an onboard server-side backend that behind the hoods runs Node.js server to facilitate data storage and fetching. Every file you put in the API file is a back-end route to our onboard node.js server. This prevents the Next.js application from running decoupled servers one for the frontend and another for the backend. When developing our backend security is of utmost importance to prevent unauthorized users from accessing data.  It is always in the best interest to secure the endpoint though, for our case, we have a single public endpoint where users can create accounts and this does not need to be secured. But let's say we would like to consume user data from our frontend, then it's best to check first if the user has a session before conducting any transactions to the database. For Login in users, we use a  Next-Auth library which takes the user input credentials and validates them against the database stored credentials in the backend, and returns a user session and a token. Modern web applications use sessions for validating and revalidating on user refresh. This prevents users from login in every time they refresh their browser.

This is the methodology that is used in the development of software and it is based on iterative and incremental processes. The main aim of this methodology develops software that will meet all the user requirements. The process usually starts from an idea on the development of the application that shall be used in accomplishing certain user functionalities. The process usually divides the project into four different stages. These stages are known as sprints and they help the developers to manage and complete the required tasks within the deadline. The process has a starting point and at this point, the starting point of the development process was the listing of the objectives of the application. The main objective of this order was to create a web page using modern and current technologies. The application shall contain 5 HTML pages with different catalogs. The application shall be designed using react js and all the content must be changed to JSON and displayed in the react js format. The application shall then be deployed on the GitHub application and shall be accessed from there. All the codes can be downloaded and accessed by anyone. The application shall be able to work on desktop applications and mobile phones. The project shall then be divided into different sprints and each spring shall be developed by different teams. The first spring in this can shall include the development of the 5 HTML pages with different catalogs. The developed pages shall then be used in the development of the next stage of the application. The second team shall use the HTML codes to create the JSON files. After the JSON files have been created the third team shall use the files to create react js application which shall be displayed on the web pages. The final stage that hall occurs, in this case, is the testing stage. This is the stage that is used to check if the application that has been created meets all the requirements. If any of the requirement is not fulfilled then the application shall be returned to the development stage. The things that were tested in this case are the codes that were used in developing the applications. The testers made sure that the used codes are HTML and react codes.  The testers also made sure that the application could be used in mobile phones and desktop computers as per the user requirements.

The main test that will be carried out for this application is responsiveness to different devices.  To facilitate these tests, we will be using our chrome browser which simulates different phone views and our application has to pass in every device simulator. Below are the test conducted on different devices.

Conclusion

Modern UI design creates a big impression for users to start trusting your brand online. With the completion of a more dynamic application, the organization will be able to win more trust from the public who visits this website. As a result, I have learned a lot concerning react development paradigms and methods for designing good contemporary user interfaces and user experience.