Project 6

Due Date: Sunday, 28 March (topic selection)

Sunday, 4 April (brief outline)

Wednesday, 21 April (presentation)

Group project

Description

In this project, you will have the opportunity briefly to investigate a topic of interest in the area of client-side web development.

Given the remaining time of the semester and the length of each presentation, you are not expected to conduct an exhaustive study of your topic. The purpose of this project is for you to find and present some starting points for using a particular technology or discuss the utility of some general approach. Please consult with me if you have any questions.

Deliverables

This project consists of the following deliverables:

• Topic selection (two or three choices in order of preference) due Sunday, 28 March.
• Brief outline of your presentation due Sunday, 4 April.
• In-class "lightning talk" (very brief presentation)  of your findings (8 minutes, followed by up to 2 minutes of questions) held on Wednesday, 21 April.
• Where appropriate, presentations should address "who/what/when/why/how" questions, discuss the significance and availability of the technology, and how it relates to competing technologies.
• Accompanying materials, such as electronic copies of your visual presentation, code examples, etc.

Groups are required to involve all members in the presentation. For example, each group member could present a separate part of the findings.

Possible topics

Here are some possible topics:

• HTML5
• Specific JavaScript/AJAX libraries of interest
• Specific web 2.0 APIs of interest
• Google Data APIs (e.g. Google Maps)
• CTA Bus Tracker API: team 5
• Client-side geo-location information in Javascript: team 1
• Specific server-side frameworks with client-side support
• Ruby on Rails: team 4
• Dojango: team 6
• Execution platforms
• JavaFX
• Silverlight: team 3
• Appcelerator
• System platforms
  
• Google Android: team 2
  
• RIA frameworks
• Mobile RIA frameworks
  
• Hosted platforms
• Ning

You are encouraged to propose other topics, subject to instructor approval.

Submission

Each team is to make exactly one submission. Any written materials should be submitted either  to Blackboard or Google Docs.

Project 5

Due Date: Wednesday, 28 April, for the in-class demo

Sunday, 2 May, for the final graded submission

Group Project

Objectives

Familiarity with

• client-side JavaScript
• DOM event handling
• Dojo toolkit
• AJAX
• mashups
• public web APIs
  

Description

In this project, you will develop a browser-based mashup (from at least two sources) of your choice, pending on instructor approval. No later than Sunday, 4 April, should you have discussed your project choice with the instructor and finalized the project requirements. This project is a great opportunity for your group to get really creative and have lots of fun. (Hint: keep it simple! As many of the examples show, some useful mashups are extremely simple.)

General requirements

For full credit, your mashup should have the following characteristics:

• data and/or functionality from two or more source APIs (a link to each source must be included in the footer of the application's pages)
• clear, useful functionality on top of the source data/functionality
  
• some form of persistent data (if required for the functionality provided)

Extra credit will be given for mashups with a focus on social justice. You may look for demographics and other suitable APIs here.

Examples

• Remix (single source): NY Times Campaign Finance Remix
• Mashup (two or more sources): HousingMaps SakMap

Sample project

The default project, in case you prefer not to come up with your own, is a continuation of the food and health themes from Project 3 assigned in an earlier version of this course. The requirements for this option, called the Recipe Sanity Check Mashup, are as follows.

• The user enters the ingredients of a recipe into a table with a column for the ingredient name and another column for the quantity.
  
• The user then presses the "check" button.
• For each ingredient, the application then shows the following information:
  
  
  • energy in kcal for the given quantity
    
  • some pictures that pop up on demand
    
• The application also calculates the total energy for the recipe.

Extra credit is given for the following additional functionality:

• (Less hard) Links to health-related articles for each ingredient.
• (Less hard) Storing data for ingredients not yet in the database.
  
• (Harder) Storing, retrieving, and searching recipes.
  

Nonfunctional requirements:

• XHTML 1.1 compliance.
• Browser-based mashup in JavaScript with one or more suitable libraries such as Dojo, JQuery, etc.
  
• Per-ingredient calory data comes from Google Base, where you can manually enter this information through your Google account. Recipes can be stored there as well.
  
• Photos come from a source such as Flickr. You should narrow the search using suitable tags.
• Health-related articles can come from the British NHS.
  

Alternative approaches

You are also welcome to build a hosted mashup using platforms such as Yahoo! Pipes or Ning. You will need a Yahoo! account to use Pipes, or a developer account on the other services, and you will learn on your own how to use them.

Submission

Please share your group's storage account with the instructor and send the instructor email as soon as your project is ready to be reviewed. The date your message is received counts as the submission date.

Project 4

Due Date: Sunday, 11 April

Group Project

Objectives

Familiarity with

• client-side JavaScript
• DOM event handling
• separation of concerns between content, visual styles, and executable code
• MVC architectural pattern
• Dojo toolkit
• Automated client-side testing

Description

In this project, you will

• reimplement project 2 (without the reporting functionality) using the Dojo toolkit
• add automated testing for the required functionality using the facilities Dojo provides

Functional requirements

These capabilities must be implemented, and there must be an integrated suite for automatically testing them:

• Manage projects (categories) for which to track time.
• create
• modify
• delete
• Start/stop tracking time spent on a project.
• If tracking for one project is in progress and the user starts tracking time on another one, the app should allow this only after confirmation.
• Real-time dashboard displaying simultaneously
• the total time worked today, this week, this month, and this year
• the time worked today, this week, this month, and this year on the currently active project

Nonfunctional requirements

• All code for dynamic client-side functionality must be provided in the form of external JavaScript source files using components from and the architecture provided by the Dojo toolkit; embedded JavaScript within XHTML documents is not permitted. Your code should include inline comments where appropriate.
  
• All content must be valid XHTML 1.1 documents. You are advised to use a validating editor or the W3C Validation Service to ensure that your content is valid. For convenience, you may want to place a link on each document that runs the validation service on this document. Your document should state the correct document type at the top.
• All rendering styles must be provided using a single shared valid CSS2 style sheet. There must not be any rendering styles in the documents themselves. You are advised to use a validating editor or the W3C CSS Validation Service to verify that your style sheet is valid.

Grading

Total: 10 points

• 0.5 - valid XHTML 1.1 (browser shows standards compliance mode)
• 0.5 - external CSS, no style attributes in content documents
• 0.5 - correct use of divs and tables
• 0.5 - consistent layout and navigation
• 1 - correct use of Dojo's framework capabilities (OO, event support, etc.)
• 1 - correct use of Dojo user interface widgets
• 3 - required functionality
• 3 - test suite

Collaboration

Consider obtaining a free hosted Subversion (SVN) repository, for example, here or here.

Submission

Please share your group's storage account with the instructor and send the instructor email as soon as your project is ready to be reviewed. The date your message is received counts as the submission date.

Project 3

Due Date: Sunday, 28 March

Objectives

• Project team formation

Description

Your job is to form a project team of size three. The remaining projects for the semester will be group projects, so it is important to have the teams ready as soon as possible. Only in exceptional cases will teams of size other than three be permitted.

Each team member will receive the same grade for a group project. At the end of the semester, however, each student will have the opportunity to comment on the relative contributions within their team. If significant disparity of contribution to group projects is reported, adjustments to students' final course grades may be made.

Submission

To submit this project, please send me email (exactly one message per team) with the names and email addresses of the team members.