Picture Courtesy: Darpan Developers

Darpan, which means mirror in Sanskrit, is a web app which reflects a student’s profile. It shows the student’s academic results, awards and achievements, extra-curricular activities, and also disciplinary warnings.

A team of four students from the batch of 2016 had worked on this app for more than eight months and when the app was launched on May 9, 2016, DWIT News caught up with one of the developers, Ashim Regmi to know more about the app.

How did you get the idea for the app?

It was back in semester six (they are in semester seven now); the college wanted an app that would compile all the information of a student and create a profile. So, I and three of my friends took up the task and started working on it.

Who were the other team members and what role did they play?

Pratik Buddhathoki, Sachin Aryal, Summit Shrestha and I worked on this app. Pratik and Summit worked on the design. Pratik also did the documentation and created the user manual for the app. Sachin and I worked on the development part.

So, what technologies did you use?

We used Grails for the development and MySQL for data management. For designing, we used HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and JQuery.

It took you quite some time to finish the app; was there any challenges?

Yes. Since we were developing this app for the college, the college had laid out some requirements. We were working accordingly. But, during the course of development, the requirements kept on changing. So, it became difficult for us. There were also some features which we wanted to add but could not due to our programming knowledge limitations.

While using the app, I found that I couldn’t edit anything except for my picture. Any comments?

Yes, the user only has the access to change his/her picture. The rest of the data is updated by the admin. The data can be extracted at once from an excel sheet by the admin.

Do you have any future plans for the app?

Right now, we don’t have any plans. We will probably make changes to the app based on the updated the requirements of the college.

Let us have a look at some screenshots of the current version of this application: