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Video platform: a customizable, rich media solution | 19

Another problem I had was about the requirements of the video platform. During my first week and the interviews I had
with the company directors. They gave me some requirements, but they left out some other requirements saying I would
know more about the other requirements after I had achieved that stage of development. Now, in a way this makes sense;
whenever I am far enough in the development, I will know more about how to go further.

But I had preferred to get all the requirements in the beginning. For example, I wasn’t told that the video platform should
have playlists. This was something I learned later on; but learning this later on, I had to change the designs and adapt the
codes so they would work with the playlists. The same goes for the design of the upload page, where a user can upload a
video; I didn’t know what fields it had to contain and in what way it should be.

The design issues were easily solved. I did my research into YouTube and other video platforms, and found out they all had
a very similar design. I also made my designs in such a way that it was very general and changes would not be that hard to
make. The playlist feature remained a problem though later on, but after a bit of setback I was able to solve that problem
also. It was simply a feature that was added on later on; the directors found out about the playlist feature while they were
looking at other video platforms, and they liked it. Thus, they had decided that they wanted to have the same feature on
their video platform.

4.3 First prototype

4.3.1 Development

The main design of the video platform was finished. It was necessary now to start coding the project, and in an incremental
way work my way up to a first prototype version. The whole point of a prototype is that the project is not finished and that
means that the presentation of the project was not that important. However, what was important was a good functioning
platform; the main logic of the platform should be coded, and the requirements should be implemented in such a way that
it was working.
I was working a lot with the 3 strategies: library,
workshop and lab. Having the documentation of the
Laravel framework open at all times in one tab of my
browser, I started programming parts of the
platform. I had decided to tackle the main important
requirement at the very beginning. I came to this
decision because It was the more important part
compared to some of the other requirements.
Finishing this part, would be a major development in
the platform. Of course I could always improve it
later on, but it would be a nice step forwards.

As a start I created a basic table in the database for
the videos, containing the necessary video
information: title, description, video-file, upload-
date etc. Next came the actual programming of the
feature; I created a basic HTML form, and started
coding the functions in PHP. I had learned quite a lot
about Laravel, and knew how to divide the code:
HTML form would go into the views folder; I would
make special routes so that you could browse to the
upload page containing the form, and the logic was
placed in one of the controller files.
Figure 9: The upload video form