Matt Jones | May 6, 2021
At SAIT in the software development program, there is a year-long project that spans 3 classes. As a team, you are expected to go and find a client who has a business problem that can be solved with a web-based solution. Our client was the founder of BakkaTown Belize, a small but growing hostel in San Pedro. We developed the BakkaTown booking website for our client.
I was one of six team members within our Capstone team and the nominated project manager for the whole project. SAIT gave us strict requirements when it came to the technologies and the scope of the project. Our project stack was React for the front end, Spring Boot for our back end, MySQL for our database, and we deployed on AWS.
The system is designed to provide an efficient attractive booking website that will replace the current flawed system. Specifically, we aim to improve the design and improve the booking functionality to sync with the Airbnb listings to prevent double bookings. To match the current system, we’ve created an admin page with similar functionality to allow for ease of use for the client and staff. Our admin functionality will match that of the current system that is used by the client.
Our new design greatly improves the aesthetics of the current website with a cleaner user interface and a responsive design for all screen sizes. With these changes, we expect to attract more attention which in turn hopes to provide more business for BakkaTown.
With the new functionality of our design, we have automated the time-consuming manual processes of checking both website's current reservations before allowing a booking to one of the sites. The anticipated website currently will synchronously update each room’s calendar for booking on both websites to prevent double booking.