16:332:568            Software Engineering of Web Applications

News and Announcements

7 May 2008

• Project demo is scheduled for Friday, May 10, 2008, during the regular class period, but in room CoRE-601. The key is a live demo of your software. You can use some slides to introduce the demo or during the demo, to explain some non-obvious concepts or design details, but the key is that you show a working product. Please bring a printed copy of any slides that you will show during the demo (print a handout, 2 slides per page).
• Each group must submit electronic archive of their project.

9 Apr 2008

• Homework #3
  This assignment is individual. In the Bishop textbook, on page 31 (Section 1.2.6), using your favorite programming language (not Matlab!), implement the formula (1.69) for Bayesian curve fitting.   [ For this you will also need to implement the formulas (1.70) - (1.72). ]   Assume some reasonable values for the parameters that need to be specified, e.g., the number of input values N.
  Download here an excerpt from Bishop, pages 24-31   [PDF file, 1.05 MBytes]
  Once you program the formula for curve fitting, test it using your own data set. Ideally, you could use a sequence of actual stock prices that your data collection module is already collecting (Group Assignment #1). Given a sequence of length N, run your program and compare the predicted price (at time N+1) with the actual price retrieved from the stock market. Repeat this 10 times for different input datasets. For performance evaluation, calculate both the absolute mean error and average relative error as shown in the lecture notes on page 52.
  Submit the following:
  1. Source code of the program
  2. Short instructions on how to compile and run your program, including the allowed range of input parameters (the so called README document)
  3. An example set of test data to test your program
  4. Brief summary of the performance evaluation (prediction errors)
  Submission deadline: Monday, April 21, 2008, no later than 5:00 PM.
  See the note about submission formats here.

19 Mar 2008

• Group Assignment #2: Developing the skeleton of the Web service. Your task is to define precisely the interface for your Web service. The process is described in the course lecture notes, Section 8.5 Developing Web Services with Axis. The interface given in Listing 8-4 and Figure 8-18(b) serves only as an example. The actual interfaces should be based on this example and should extend/modify it, but every team should invest effort to come up with their own interface for the Web service.
  All students are strongly encouraged to read the entire Chapter 8 for better understanding of Web services. Also check online links for Web services for additional information. You can use Apache Axis or any other platform that you find suitable for developing Web services.
  Once you are done, submit by email the following files:
  1. Java source code of your Web service interface
  2. WSDL document generated using Java2WSDL
  3. All files (the entire folder) generated using WSDL2Java
  4. Both original and modified Java code of the file ____SoapBindingImpl.java that calls your server implementation code
  5. Text document "README" that briefly describes which file or folder contains what
  Submission deadline: Friday, March 28, 2008, no later than 5:00 PM.
  ( Note: Keep this application since you will need it for your group project. )

  Note: Should you wish to consider technologies other than Java or Apache Axis, here are some options:

  • Microsoft .NET Web services
    see also: Creating and using Web Services with the .NET framework and Visual Studio.Net
  • Programming Web Services With Perl Homepage
    see also: use Perl | Creating Web Services with XML-RPC
    and: ONLamp.com -- Developing RESTful Web Services in Perl
  • webservices.xml.com: Creating and Consuming Web Services With PHP
    see also: ONLamp.com -- PHP Web Services Without SOAP
  • Cape Clear
  In this case, please keep in mind these two things:
  1. The department administrators will not be able to provide support
  2. I am familiar with Java but not with other technologies. In order to facilitate my reading and grading of your reports you should invest extra effort to explain how that other technology works—you should write an equivalent of Section 8.5 Developing Web Services with Axis, so that I can understand your solution and grade it appropriately.
• Interim Project Report due on Monday, March 31, 2008, no later than 5:00 PM.

2 Mar 2008

• Project Presentation #1 will take place on Friday, March 7, 2008, during the regular class period. Please check about the presentation details here.

15 Feb 2008

• Group Assignment #1: Downloading stock information and storing it in a MySQL database. Download from Yahoo! Finance or Google Finance or any other site that provides stock market quotes.
  Download here ZIP file containing example code (Look for Part #2 Backend Processing source code, which does much more, but extract and use only what you need). Your task is to develop the application that runs continuously as a background process and periodically retrieves stock information, parses the received responses, and stores the extracted parameters into a local MySQL database. You can reuse the example code, but then remove all other functionality that is not relevant to this assignment.
  Each group should submit a single ZIP file containing:
        the source code of the application, the database schema, the data collected so far, and a brief README document explaining how to install and run the application and the database.
  Submission deadline: Thursday, February 28, 2008, no later than 5:00 PM.
  ( Note: Keep this application since you will need it for your group project. )
• Homework #2
  This assignment is individual. Submission deadline: Wednesday, March 5, 2008, no later than 5:00 PM.

31 Jan 2008

• Homework #1:
  Read Section 1.3.2 Case Study 2: Personal Investment Assistant in the course lecture notes. Also visit these websites:
  • Technical Analysis
  • Fundamental Analysis
  Search the web for description of trends, indicators, and patterns used in technical analysis. Example patterns include:
  • Trend lines and channels (explain how to draw a trend line and what defines a channel)
  • Support and resistance (define and show examples)
  • Major trend reversals (define and show examples)
  • Head-and-shoulders pattern; flags; pennants; triangles (define and show examples)
  Every student should submit an individual essay describing some of these (or other) patterns and indicators. (I hope that different students will select different patterns.) The essay should have a cover page containing the student's name, the essay title, the course name, and the submission date. References should be listed at the end to credit the sources (books, articles, URLs, etc.). The essay can be up to 5 pages long, and should be emailed as a PDF document by Tuesday, February 5, 2008, no later than 3:00 PM.

• Note About Assignment Submission:
  When submitting your homework assignments, please use only the following file formats:
  • If submitting multiple files, please collect all files in one and submit using the ZIP or gzip compression software. (Please do not use the RAR file format.)
  • If submitting a short how-to-run-a-program description (known as README document), please submit a plain text file (file extension .txt).
  • If submitting a design document with text and graphics, please submit an PDF file. (Please do not send Word files or any other word-processing format—only PDF!)
    Here is a PDF writer you can use in MS Windows. Apple Macs automatically convert postscript to PDF by clicking on the file icon. There are UNIX utilities that convert postscript to PDF for Linux users; make sure you include all fonts in the created PDF.
  • If submitting a program, please submit the source code in the language you programmed, such as Java, C++, etc. (Please do not send executable files.)

• Course Projects:
  Students should form project teams of 4 - 5 students each. Email the information about team members by Wednesday, February 6, 2008, no later than 5:00 PM. All teams have the same objective, which is described here. Each team is expected to work completely independently from other teams and develop their own solution. Look here for additional project information (NOTE: outdated, will be updated soon).

30 Jan 2008

• Updated class lecture notes on Software Engineering are now available.
  The current update revises only Chapters 1 - 3, which are not part of this course. Chapters 6 - 8, which will be covered in this course, will be updated later.

• Course home page
• Course syllabus page