CS 271: Wrapping Up the Final Project

Over the next week, you should be finishing up your final project for this course, getting the web site into a form where it is ready for use, and preparing the written materials that you will turn in.

Finishing the Web Site

Ideally, by now, you should have a functional web site. However, you will want to do some final clean-up and polishing. Here are some tasks that might still need to be done. (If there are people on the team who have not yet contributed a fair share of the work, here is an opportunity for them to catch up.)

• Program Style -- Your servlets and other Java classes should follow all the rules for good programming style, such as rules about commenting, naming, indentation, and error handling. Your JSP pages should not have a lot of Java code on them, but whatever code they do contain should, of course, follow good programming style too.
• Client-side Programming -- I expect your web site to use some of the client-side techniques that were covered in the first half of the course. This means using CSS, JavaScript, and the DOM. CSS should, of course, be used for basic things like setting colors and fonts, but I also hope to see some more advanced CSS features -- such as borders, list styles, and positioning -- used to improve the appearance of the web pages. JavaScript can be used, for example, for client-side validation of form data. Combining it with the DOM, you might do some simple animations (like a slideshow of images instead of a simple banner at the top of the page). You might make it possible for the user to hide/show individual comments or other segments of the page. You might even use Ajax.
• User Experience -- You should think about ways that you can improve the user experience of your site. For example, use cookies to allow for automatic login or to store site preferences. Have your friends test the site to see if the user interface makes sense to them. Add an "About this Site" link with basic information about the site and how to use it. If the user requests a page that requires a log in, send the user to that page after logging in.
• Security and Robustness -- For example: Have you properly sanitized data that is going into a database or onto the web page? Do you always check for invalid request parameters? Do you check for a logged-in user on any page that requires a login?

What to turn in

For the purposes of turning in your project, you should make sure that the CVS repository is up to date. I will grab the project from there. If you have other material, such as planning and design work, that you think would help me to evaluate the project, you can turn them in as well.

Remember that your grade on the project will be a combination of a group grade and an individual grade. This means that I need to know what work you did.Quoting from the original final project description:

All files in the project should include a comment at the top with the names of the people who actually worked on that file and some indication of the nature of their contribution (e.g. "wrote most of the code", "added method XXX", "did some minor code polishing", "fixed bug in method XXX").

At the end of the project, everyone will turn in an individual summary report of their work, including a self-evaluation and an evaluation of their team. I strongly suggest that you keep a log of the work that you do on the project, and turn in that log as part of your final report.