http://www.ccs.neu.edu/teaching/web/It is expected that students will take a very active role in learning the material of this course. Formal assignments will play only a small role in the learning process. We expect that students will:
It is expected that students will build a major web site on the ASP server that will show what they have learned and accomplished. Each student web site must be designed as a learning tool for the other students in the course. Thus both the quality of the work and its documentation is important.
We expect that students will do this work without explicit prompting by the instructors. All students must act as self starters.
The course will operate in an open-source manner. To make this automatic, each student must deploy a Sources Server that will automatically serve the source of all text and image files on the site. This will mean that as soon as you post such files to the web, those files will be visible to the instructors and to the other students in the course.
Since the instructor sites mentioned in the Introduction deploy a Sources Server, you may use one of the sites to get the code for your own Sources Server! This means that you can actually deploy a Sources Server in a few minutes.
Before attempting to install Sources Server, you should first follow the startup steps as described in Startup and build the sample test site.
Here are the details of how to obtain the files for Sources Server. You will need to find and copy 3 files from an instructor site.
source directory, obtain 2 files:
Default.aspxDefault.aspx.csapp_code directory, obtain 1 file:
FileTools.cs
In your web site on your local machine, create the folders source
and app_code. Then create 3 empty files as named above. First,
right-click on the source folder in Visual Studion 2008 and
select Add New Item.... Then, select
Web Form and name the file Default.aspx. Then
click Add. This process will create both the file
Default.aspx and its companion file with the
.cs extension. Proceed similarly with the app_code
folder except that you should choose Class to create the
C# file FileTools.cs. Delete any automatic
text that Visual Studio has placed in these 3 files to create empty files.
Next, in a browser, go to an instructor site and find each of the 3 files. Select the complete text of each file, copy to the clipboard, go to the corresponding empty file on your site, and then paste. You will now have a Sources Server!
The instructor Sources Server is designed to keep 2 directories hidden
in case you have material that should not be served. These directories are
named hidden and secret. You should use these
directories sparingly.
This Sources Server can serve you for the entire course but if you think you can create a more elegant version then by all means replace the instructor server with one of your own design as soon as you have learned enough to do so.
Documentation is an essential part of the course. The instructors and your fellow students must be able to understand what you did, why you did it, what were the challenges, and how they were overcome.
You must document your pages in well written English. You must also have a very clean and well organized coding style and thoughtful code comments. In practice, many students show the sites created in this course to future employers so be certain to demonstrate the quality of your thinking and work in your documentation and code style.
There are two possible ways to organize the documentation.
The first form of documentation is less intrusive since there is no need to change the appearance of a web site page in order to provide a link to its documentation. However, in the case of pages that show experiments, the second form of documentation may be just the approach to take.
You may write the documentation using classic HTML with CCS for creating the styles. If you wish to be more elaborate, you can place your documentation in XML files and then use XSLT to create the styled HTML files. This method is initially harder to do but can give you more flexibility downstream. In the course, you will see examples of XML transformed by XSLT.
In addition to regular documentation, you may wish to write explanations of web development topics. If you learn a topic and think you have a better way to explain it, then write up your thoughts and make them public. Furthermore, give references to books and/or online resources. This may be a real contribution to the course.
If you make use of the work of others, you must give explicit and complete credit both in your English documentation and in your code comments. Provide appropriate links to the sites on which your work is based. If you state and we are made aware of the fact that you have used the work of another student or used tools from an external site, then that is fine.
In cases where you have used resources that you did not create, you should state how much of your site is based on your own work and how much is based on the work of others.
If you fail to give explicit credit, then that will be considered plagiarism.
Upon completion of a piece of work that is installed and documented on the ASP
server, students should announce this work to the students in the course using
the e-mail address: ws-all
Comments from other students will be welcome. Try to be as positive as possible in such comments ... we all need support. You may also use this e-mail address to seek help from the instructors and students in the course if you have technical problems.
To contact only the instructors, use the e-mail address: ws
Each student will also be required to maintain a Progress Blog. This blog should quickly summarize what work has been done on a given day whether reading, design, experimentation, coding, or site building. Peter Douglass plans to provide software that will automatically build the blog using the individual blog files that you create after each day’s work. As the instructors review your site during the term, it will be a bad sign to see long periods of time with no entries in your blog.
It is permissible to form a team to do a particular piece of work and to dissolve that team when the work is done. In this case, the work may be placed on the site for one team member or may be distributed across sites. If the work involves web services that call other web services then it is likely that the work will need to be distributed.
Provide appropriate links on all student sites involved. Also, explain in the documentation who did what. Keep in mind that if you do form a team, then the team must accomplish more than what one student could accomplish.
Students are encouraged to present their work in class. Each student should do at least one presentation during the semester. Contact your instructor by e-mail when you have completed a piece of work that you wish to present.
Note that a presentation may be from 5 to 20 minutes depending on how much you have to show. You can demo a site, give an overview of the documentation, and look at highlights of the source code. Assume that your fellow students can follow up on the details.
It is permissible to add public toolkits to your site. In the documentation for your site, you must explain the use of such tools and provide appropriate links. It is also permissible to connect to free, public web services on the internet and indeed it will probably make your experience in the course more valuable if you do so. It is important that the services be free so that others can play with your work without incurring charges.
Consistent with college policy, you may not hack into non-public sites (of course you knew this).
Grades will be determined by the impact each student makes on the learning process for everyone and the quality of what is presented on the student web site. There will be no exams. We will learn what you have done from one-on-one conversations, from your class presentations, from what your site does, and from the code and documentation publicly available on your site.
All materials created in the course must be left on the server when the course is over so that they may be used as a springboard for future courses. You retain all rights to develop the work after the course in whatever way you choose. Indeed, some of you may produce artifacts that are worth distributing on your own internet site when the course is complete.