Django-Based Campus Print Reservation Website Design And Implementation

Since printers began their path toward ubiquity more than a century ago, as a kind ofoutput device, they have always been playing an important role in daily life. Printertechnology is developing rapidly, but the printing procedure has rarely changed.Most college students don’t own printers. They put documents into USB flash disk andturn to print shops in the campus. Staff there will ask them for the printing requirements, suchas the paper size and page range. Obviously, this traditional approach has the followingproblems:(1) Safety problemThe USB flash disk carried with the students may have carried some computer virus andinfected the print shop computer. Thus the print shop computer may pass the virus to otherstudents’ disks on and on.(2) Inflexible and time-consumingStudents probably need to wait during the busy hours because the number of printhouses in the campus could not meet the need of the students. It may cause chaos sometime.Moreover, students cannot make print orders in advance so that print houses have plenty oftime to finish print jobs.(3) Fussy and high error ratesDue to massive noises in the print houses, staff are very likely to get wrong printingrequirements and waste both paper and time.As Internet applications and services grow popular, inspired by the Google Cloud Print, anew printing procedure is presented in this thesis. The student may choose a print shop,upload the files to a website, set the printing requirements, reserve a time and go to the printshop to pick the files printed. We design and implement a campus print reservation websitebased on B/S(Browser/Server) architecture with Django framework. It is practical, platformindependent, easy spreading and above all, it simplifies the printing procedure.The website serves both students and teachers. We build the website prototype withAxure RP and implement it with Django. The system is composed of three layers, thefront-end, the backend, and the database. We use Bootstrap to build the front-end and Nginxfor the web server. To join Django and Nginx, uWSGI is adopted. The system is deployed to a The system aims at obtaining a perfect User Experience, which few but accurate stepsare needed to complete a reservation. We follow the C.R.A.P(Contrast, Repetition, Alignment,Proximity) principle building front-end, so as to present simple and elegant web pages. At thebackend, programs are designed in modules, tables in the database are designed properly andall endeavors are made to improve the server performance.In general, the website not only facilitates users’campus lives, but also increases workefficiency of the staff in print shops. Thanks to the B/S architecture, users could makereservations whenever and wherever possible. Besides, the system is easily maintained andspreading to other colleges.As the maturity of the system increases, many more other extensions are allowed, suchas online payment and document sharing. Even mobile applications may be offered to theusers to make everything more convenient.