Restaurant Details n-tier web application

The restaurant web application developed will represent a platform of a Restaurant details application that is meant for chefs and waiters. The restaurant web application has a chain of authority in which the chefs has a higher authority than waiters in system. The authorization system has divided the privileges into two distinct groups, giving the chefs more privileges and more capabilities as compared to the waiters. This allows chefs to access more confidential information and more protected areas of the system. The system being developed will have basic functionalities will focus on the critical parts of any restaurant system to function successfully.

Restaurant Details n-tier web application 1
Restaurant Details n-tier web application
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Restaurant Details n-tier web application 2
Introduction
The restaurant web application developed will represent a platform of a Restaurant
details application that is meant for chefs and waiters. The restaurant web application has a
chain of authority in which the chefs has a higher authority than waiters in system. The
authorization system has divided the privileges into two distinct groups, giving the chefs
more privileges and more capabilities as compared to the waiters. This allows chefs to access
more confidential information and more protected areas of the system (Nagpal et al., 2015).
The system being developed will have basic functionalities will focus on the critical parts of
any restaurant system to function successfully.
N-tier architecture
This form of software architecture can also be called multitier architecture and is basically
used in client-server related systems in which the presentation, business processing and data
layer are separated by the implementation of code in a number of different layers(where n
represents the number of layers being used). This architecture makes it possible for system
developers to create systems that are flexible and code that can be reused easily. By
separation of these layers, developer can be able to modify a specific part of a system without
having to modify the whole system again.
The application implements a basic 3 tier architecture. A 3 tier architecture is an n-tier
design in which the user interface, the data access, the functioning process logic and
computer data storage are designed, implemented and maintained differently as individual
modules on separate platforms (Tong et al., 2016). Within the application the data source
will form the data layer, the logical layer (.aspx.cs) will form the functional process logic,
the user interface is developed using the (.aspx) files which will form the application layer
and the database (restaurant_details.mdf) will form the data layer.

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Applying AJAX
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a set of web development tools and
technologies which are used on the client section in order to come up with asynchronous
website application systems. It uses XHTML to handle the contents, CSS to ensure
presentation, DOM (document object model) is also used for presentation and JavaScript to
handle dynamic content display (Mott et al., 2015).
Advantages of AJAX
Reduce the traffic travels between the client and the server.
Response time is faster so increases performance and speed.
You can use JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) which is an alternative to XML.
JSON is key value pair and works like an array.
You can use Firefox browser with an add-on called as Firebug to debug all Ajax calls.
Ready Open source JavaScript libraries available for use – JQuery, Prototype,
Scriptaculous, etc.
AJAX communicates over HTTP Protocol.
The restaurant application system has applied AJAX in order to bring form two
behaviours
1. Displaying of contents stored within the database. AJAX have been used in the
development of one CRUD operations that is reading from the database.
Figure 1 shown below is the output of displaying data about restaurants from the
database.

Restaurant Details n-tier web application 4
Figure 1 list of restaurant using AJAX
Source (Author,2019)
2. creating of live search. The live search in this case has been developed to look up
information about the users of the system both the chefs and waiters and then give results.
When the results are missing no information is viewed.
Figure 2 shown below shows the output of searching for waiter whose username is
testwaiter1
Figure 2 live search results
Secure password storage
The use of a strong password storage mechanism and strategies in any system creates
secure systems and is also helps to put up a protection against data breaches that may put
organizations in serious danger one of the most used techniques for securing and encryption
of passwords is hashing. The restaurant application has used SHA256 hashing algorithm to
encrypt the password. SHA256 generates a unique fixed size 32 bit hashed value. It is a one-

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way function which means that the function can’t be decrypted back to its original plain text
(Shen et al., 2015).
Password protection through hashing algorithms and techniques
Hashing of a password ensures the restructuring of the original plain text into a form
that one cannot use in order to come up with the original value. During hashing of the
password provided by the user, the user’s password is passed over the algorithm’s key in
order to get the hashed value. Thus we can say that a hashed password value s obtained from
a set of both the user password and the algorithm’s key value that is known to the specific
website.
The hashed password needs to be used during the log in process, however since the
value of the password the user will provide will not be the same as the value of the password
which is stored in the database there is need to hash the value the user will provide during the
logging in process.
The hashed password value cannot be directly used to get the original password but
using trial and error one can be able to predict the actual value since hashing is one way
function. The only way to decipher a hashed password is through use of brute force attacks
Some of the hashing algorithms are described below:
MD-5
It uses hash values of 128-bits and is not very difficult to produce. MD-5 is used to verify
files and to ensure that files that are being downloaded have not been messed with.
SHA-1

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It is a hashing algorithm that generate a hashed value of 160-bits and is usually used in form
of a hexadecimal value of length 40..
SHA-2
This was developed after SHA-1 and in full it is called Secure Hash Algorithm 2. It is a group
of hashing functions that generate values of larger length that is 224, 384, 256 or 512 bits. It
is usually denoted as SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384 or SHA-512.
Bcrypt
Bcrypt also called a work flow is an encryption algorithm which made up of a salt, and is
designed to offer protection of data against brute-force attacks by causing the normal
operations to work slower than usual. It employs an algorithmic mathematical factor that
efficiently passes a user’s password through a certain number of rounds of extensions before
it can be hashed.
Figure 3 shows SHA-256 being used in the login section
Figure 3 using SHA-256
Source (Author, 2019)
Figure 4 shows the output of using SHA-256
Figure 4 hashed password example

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Source (Author, 2019)
Additional use cases
In addition to the specified requirements a searching system using AJAX was
developed. This was helpful in enabling the users of the system to be able to search for users
who exist within the system directly from the database. The searching system gives a result of
all users within a table after a user has searched for either the user name or real name of the
person they wish to find. The system offers a live search functionality in which the search
filter is autocompleted as one types in the search box.
Figure 5 live search module
Source (Author, 2019)

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Conclusion
Restaurant detail web application has made use multitier architectural model design
due to the their advantages such as scalability that ensures that the developed layer can be
scaled horizontally, performance because the presentation layer in the architecture can cache
for requests thus removing the load that is put on the application and data tier section, high
degree and increased degree of flexibility during the deployment of the platforms and
configuration, it also improves reusability of code modules. Other advantages of using
multitier includes integrity of data, security is improved because the client cannot be able
access the database directly. Multitier architecture systems are also easy to maintain because
changes in one module cannot affect the code in the other modules thus improving the overall
performance.

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References
Mott, C. and Murray, G., Oracle America Inc, 2015. Server based framework for improving
Ajax performance. U.S. Patent 8,990,289.
Nagpal, A., Singer, K.C. and Assenmacher, H., APPCENTRAL Inc, 2015. System and
method for third party creation of applications for mobile appliances. U.S. Patent 9,135,434.
Shen, F., Shen, C., Liu, W. and Tao Shen, H., 2015. Supervised discrete hashing. In
Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (pp. 37-45).
Tong, L., Li, Y. and Gao, W., 2016, April. A hierarchical edge cloud architecture for mobile
computing. In IEEE INFOCOM 2016-The 35th Annual IEEE International Conference on
Computer Communications (pp. 1-9). IEEE.