Chemical Inventory System for Chemistry Department of Liberal Arts College

Abstract

Within the Chemistry department of a given liberal arts college in the US, chemical inventory has been managed through a traditionally manual process using spreadsheets and documents that quickly became unstructured, inefficient, and disorganized. As such, this project aimed for the development of a custom-built, open-source, web-based Chemical inventory system. This project has been intended to help streamline the client’s chemical management process and migrate physical or paper-based data into a more efficient and structured digital environment. This project also intended to serve as a pioneer in IT modernization initiatives through increased adoption of software-based solutions within the department.

The proposed system has been developed using a distributed logical architecture consisting of separate front-end (web), back-end (application), and database (data) layers. The front-end has been built as a Single Page Application (SPA) using Angular/Typescript. The back-end has been built as a Java Spring Boot web services application with various RESTful API endpoints for serving and accepting structured JSON data. The relational database has been built using PostgreSQL. System components have been deployed and hosted on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure.

The client is a Chemistry Professor with a bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. in Chemistry who is currently working at a liberal arts college in South Carolina, USA. Also, given the broad scope of a liberal arts college compared to a research university, the Chemistry department has a fairly limited budget and lower priority being given to the consideration of software-based solutions.

This project has been developed using the Kanban framework that focuses on flexible, iterative, visualized, and transparent methods and practices. There have also been consultations, and reviews of online references for the design of website templates, UI/UX interfaces, data modeling, database schema, and API endpoints. Also, the Kanban framework has allowed for continuous collaboration with the client for design, demos, testing, and feedback throughout the project duration. These helped assess the development progress and software output in terms of matching the client’s needs and expectations.