ITEC 4020- Project Milestones

In your team project, you will implement an online learning community. Online learning
communities are social and collaborative networks using a shared Web-based space. Members
discuss issues, seek advice, ask questions, hold meetings, and work together on projects. The
communities are built around a specific topic: photo, sports, education, etc. An example
illustrated by the textbook is photo.net

You can choose what community you want to build, choose something that you feel passionate
about it and that you might want to continue develop after you finish this course. Independent of
the topic of your community, you will build it as an Internet Web application, accessible through
a browser or a mobile device. You will develop it incrementally, using the textbook as a
guideline. Here is a web version of the textbook

Milestone 1

a) Define and document usage scenarios for your community, that is, what exactly are its
functions, as seen by the users.
b) Implement User Registration and Management. Your web-site shall permit the user to
register, define their profiles. The user can be grouped in different categories. User
information is stored in the database (Exercises 1-5 from “User Registration and
Management”).

For Milestone 1, read and follow the guidelines from the textbook, Chapters 1-5. Make sure your
implementation answers Exercise 1-5 from chapter “User Registration and Management”

Milestone 2

a) Content management: authorship, approval, moderation, reference ("X is a

comment on Y" or "A is a response to B"). Associates contributions to authors;
establishes the relationships between content artefacts.
(Implement Exercises 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 from Content Management chapter)
Note 1: For Exercise 3 you only implement and document content versioning
Note 2: For Exercise 5 your group has to provide a written critique to a least
one project (see the e-mail from course instructor or TA)
b) Discussion forum: The most basic Web service, built on top of the content
management system. Supports categorization, moderation, breakout and
reassemble.
Notes : Implement only one forum. Exercise 1-5

For Milestone 2, read and follow the guidelines from the textbook, Chapters 6.
Milestone 3

a) Search: Implement Exercises 1, 2, 3, 4 from Chapter 12.

As a Bonus, add a customized Google search to your website ( see
http://www.google.ca/intl/en/options/ for options and details
Note: For exercise 1, discuss with the TA or the instructor the type of queries that are the
most common to your website
b) Web Service: Implement Exercises 5 and 6 from “Distributed computing with HTTP...”
chapter of the text book
c) (OPTIONAL) Scalability analysis. For the Web Service implemented at b) above, draw a
scalability diagram and show response time, throughput and utilization as a function of
arrival rate.
Note: The diagrams have to be drawn experimentally. Use a commercial load tester or
write your own client to simulate the arrival rate. The experiments can be conducted on
the development environment. Discuss the findings (half page)

For Milestone 3, read and follow the guidelines from the textbook, Chapters 11 and 12.

Notes:

A. The marking is based on the following criteria:

1. Correctness and Completeness of Programs (as per milestones) /

24
2. Testing (make sure it does not crash at user inputs) /16
3. Code Quality /6
a. Modularization and Code Quality (as per your programming
courses)
b. Code formatting (indentation)
c. Internal Documentation (code comments)
4. External documentation (readme file) and the ppt presentation /6
5. Usability (UI) /8

B. For every milestone, you have to package your software and upload it on SIT server

1. Your application should be available on sit.yorku.ca:8080/grpX

2. The documentation, as required by different Exercises, has to be accessible from
sit.yorku.ca:8080/grpX/doc/MilestoneX. The TA will check this URL only. Please
provide the slide presentation as well.
3. The source files (Java, JSP or similar) have to be accessible from
sit.yorku.ca:8080/grpX/src/MilestoneX . Have an index html file explaining what each
file does and providing the links to the files.
4. To verify the admin page functionality, the TA needs an admin user id (find those from
TA or instructor).
5. Once the due date passes, do not touch the application until the TA tells you he/she
finished reviewing. Otherwise, you risk to crash the application and if the TA does not
find it running, he/she will deduct a lot of points from your mark.