This assignment was awesome because we got to design and think about the security and development operations that would be required for the Car Sharing IS. I am particularly interested in dev ops because I understand how important it is to be able to backup and recover data quickly and easily. Additionally, I feel as though this is one of the more challenging aspects to computer science because it really challenges your understanding of how the entire system operates as a whole, including the operating system technology selected, server technology selected, database technology selected, DNS, firewalls, etc. work together. Programming is much more mathematical and structured in the sense that, there is a path to follow in order to accomplish your goal. However, with development operations, I feel as though there is a lot more strategy and thought that go into each decision.

I didn’t find the assignment very hard or confusing, but I could possibly see how question 4, b. may confuse some people who do not understand what Access Control Lists are. The question mentioned visiting page 397 of the textbook but on that page, I did not see any figure for an ACL, only a short paragraph describing what ACLs do. Luckily, I am familiar with ACL and provided an example formatted to work as a JSON configuration file for the StrongLoop back end Node.js framework. I hope I get full marks for only displaying a few examples of the ACLs for the reservation table and not providing ALL of the ACLs for the table.

If anyone reading this uses Node.js, I would highly recommend using the StrongLoop framework. It allows you to quickly and easily create tables and expose them through generic RESTful endpoints. If you use Angular.js, this framework also provides a Software Development Kit which allow you to generate the angular classes that your application can use which are based from your database schema. It truly is a convenient way to be able join your front end and back end database access classes together.