Wonde API Exercise

This Laravel application demonstrates use of the Wonde API to satisfy the following user story:

As a Teacher I want to be able to see which students are in my class each day of the week so that I can be suitably prepared.

Set up

The local development environment I use is Lando. However, to run the app without the overhead of installing Lando I've also included a Dockerfile.

Quick run with Docker

You'll need Docker installed to run with this method.

From the root of the codebase (this folder), run:

docker run --rm -it -p 8000:8000 $(docker build -q .)

Go to http://0.0.0.0:8000/ in your browser and you should see the application home screen.

Full development environment with Lando

To run the app using Lando, you'll need to have some prerequists installed. Please follow https://docs.lando.dev/getting-started/installation.html to install Lando and dependencies.

Then, to start the app:

> lando start

Go to https://wonde.lndo.site/ in your browser and you should see the application home screen.

Example data

Here are two examples of Employee IDs which can be used for demo purposes:

• A500460806 an employee who has classes (w/c 27th March 2023)
• A199135293 an employee who does not have classes (w/c 27th March 2023).

Running tests

The application contains a unit test and a feature test. These can be run with the following command:

docker run --rm -it -p 8000:8000 $(docker build -q .) php artisan test

Assumptions

I've adopted a relatively narrow interpretation of the functionality required to satisfy the user story. I've assumed that the user story is a feature within a larger system that provides authentication and access restriction based on employee ID.

The features I've chosen to concentrate on are the following:

• Presentation of basic lists of student names, ordered by lesson start time.
• Integration of TailwindCSS for some simple theming.
• Caching of API responses in order to reduce the number of requests required and to speed up the application. I found this was very useful during development as well as for a hypothetical end user.
• Simple error handling on submission of the form.
• A unit test and a feature test.
• Provision of a Dockerfile to allow the application to be run without setup.

Further development

• Lessons in the timetable could be grouped by day instead of just being in a long chronological list.

• Data presented on the timetable could be made more useful by adding additional metadata. For example, each lesson could be labelled with the course name or subject; the period number of the lesson could be displayed.

• Long lists of students could be collapsed when the page loads and expanded only when the lesson is clicked. This could be done with a Vue.js accordion. Something similar could be done with the days of the week so that a user only needs to click the day they wish to browse.

• Caching of API responses could be improved by implementing database, memcached or redis caching instead of simple file caching.

• Feature tests could be made more useful by implementing Laravel Dusk to interact with the application through a headless browser. Tests could be integrated with Github Actions so that when a pull request is made the tests are automatically run on it.