COURSE INFORMATION Fall 2006

60-334 WWW Information Systems

School of Computer Science, University of Windsor

Instructor:
Randy Fortier, School of Computer Science. Email: rfortier@uwindsor.ca
Room: 8115 LT ext. 3766

Office Hours: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 10:00am – 11:30am, LT 8115

Purpose of the course and learning resources:

This course is designed for people who want to make their data available to others over the Internet. Topics will
include WWW authoring, WWW site planning, executable programs that create dynamic documents, the client-
server model, multi-tier WWW software architecture, and security aspects.

Required textbooks:
 JSP: A Practical Guide for Java Programmers (1558608362)
 Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 (0471785415)

Lectures and tutorials

Students will have the opportunity to meet with the instructors, with other students, and with teaching assistants
through the following:

 Some formal lectures every week – see schedule for times.

 One-to-one consultations with teaching assistants as required.
 Discussion and interaction with other students through the Internet
o https://janus.newcs.uwindsor.ca/phpBB2/login.php

Course notes and web page

http://elvis.csfac8.uwindsor.ca/courses/60-334/

Computing resources
The following computing resources will be available for students taking this course:

 A distributed-computing network, accessible through a graphic interface provided by X-terminals and

Sunrays located in dedicated laboratories on the 3rd floor of Lambton Tower and Erie Hall, or through PCs
in an open laboratory in the Computer Centre, or, for students who have the necessary equipment, from
home via modems.
 State-of-the-art parallel-processing Sun computer servers.

Teaching assistance provided

 The course instructor will give lectures and will directly supervise the marking of all tests and exams. The
instructor will also be available for consultation after students have first met with teaching assistants.
 A number of undergraduate and/or graduate teaching assistants will be available for several hours each
week for one-to-one consultation at times and places that will be announced on the course website.
 The instructor will directly mark the major project.
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Work to be undertaken by students:

Preparation for lectures
Attendance at all lectures and tutorials is highly recommended. Some of the concepts covered are difficult and
professors will attempt to present the concepts in such a way as to make them easier to understand. Students
should read the course notes ahead of lectures. A detailed schedule showing the topic of each lecture is given
later. Lectures are not substitutes for student reading. Students who do not read ahead may find themselves lost
in the lectures.

Major Individual Project

The project for this course is a particularly important course requirement. The nature of web and Internet
application development and design is such that in order for skills to develop, hands-on experience is necessary.
The project in this course is intended to give students practice with the same technologies learned in the
coursework. Thus, completing the project not only prevents deductions, but also helps the student prepare for the
tests and examination.

Revision for test and exams

Several opportunities are prepared for students who wish to do well on their tests and exams. Former midterm and
final exam questions are posted as assignments (which are not to be marked), including solutions. This will allow a
student to stage their own practice tests when they feel they are ready to take the test or exam. All lecture notes
and examples are provided on the course website. The textbook(s) is/are an excellent resource when writing
programs, and it is acceptable to bring your textbook(s) to the tests and exam.

Teaching Evaluation
Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) forms will be administered during the last two weeks of the class schedule.

Weekly work schedule

In order to keep up with the work required for this course it is a good idea for students to write down a weekly
schedule, such as the following, filling in the time and location column according to which sections you are in and
when you can schedule reading time, etc.

Task Duration (minimum)

Reading of lecture notes 1 hour
Lectures 3 hours
Project work 6 hours
Weekly TOTAL (excluding revision for tests and exam) 10 hours

Evaluation Scheme
Assessment of students taking 60-334 consists of various components. They will be weighted as follows in the
calculation of the final grade. The location of the tests will be the same as the lectures. The location of the final
exam will be published in the exam schedule. All communications during evaluation procedures must be in
English.

Component Date Location Weight

Midterm Tuesday, October 24th, 11:30am Essex 186 30%
Major Individual Project Tuesday, November 21st, 11:59pm Online 30%
Final Exam Saturday, December 16th, 12:00pm TBA 40%

Opportunity will be given to students to review class tests and final examinations. Under most circumstances, it is
advised to view these papers during the prescribed viewing sessions. The dates/times of these viewing sessions
will be announced in class and/or on the course website. The test and examination marks will not be changed
unless there is an error in the marking procedure or mistake in addition. The project marks will be evaluated
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carefully, and will be subjectively evaluated. Thus, project marks are not negotiable. There will not be any make-
up tests or make-up final exam for this course.

The final letter grade will be calculated from the raw scores using the following table:

Lower Upper Grade Lower Upper Grade

93.0 100 A+ 63.0 66.9 C
86.0 92.9 A 60.0 62.9 C-
80.0 86.9 A- 57.0 59.9 D+
77.0 79.9 B+ 53.0 56.9 D
73.0 76.9 B 50.0 52.9 D-
70.0 72.9 B- 35.0 49.9 F
67.0 69.9 C+ 0.0 34.9 F-

Access to computing resources:

Computing laboratories will be available from the second week of the semester onwards. The laboratories are
located on the third floor of Lambton Tower and Erie Hall. Teaching assistants will be available to provide help to
students throughout the week. Whenever the laboratory is full, students can also use PCs in the Computer Centre,
next to the CAW Student Centre.

While it is possible for a student to use his/her own home computer for work, the project must be submitted on the
Luna server. Therefore, to prevent any porting problems, all work should occur directly on Luna. A student can
SSH into Luna, and set up an HTTP tunnel for their home browser to access their web site. Instructions for doing
so can be found in the ‘getting started with your project’ tutorial.

Students who have difficulties with the network, or who have questions concerning modem access from home, etc.,
should first of all contact the Computing Consultants in IT Services, and if they are still in need of advice, should
contact the student teaching assistants for this course.

Policy on cheating:
The professors and teaching assistants for 60-334 will put a great deal of effort into helping students to understand
and to learn the material in the course. However, they will not tolerate any form of cheating.

The professors and teaching assistants will report any suspicion of cheating to the Director of the School of
Computer Science. If sufficient evidence is available, the Director will begin a formal process according to the
University Senate Bylaws. The instructor will not negotiate with students who are accused of cheating but will pass
all information to the Director of the School of Computer Science.

The following behaviour will be regarded as cheating (together with other acts that would normally be regarded as
cheating in the broad sense of the term):

 Copying assignments  Having access to the exam/test paper prior

 Allowing another student to copy an to the exam/test
assignment from you and present it as their  Asking a teaching assistant for the answer to
own work a question during an exam/test
 Copying from another student during a test  Presenting another’s work as your own
or exam  Modifying answers after they have been
 Referring to notes, textbooks, etc. during a marked
test or exam  Any other behaviour which attempts unfairly
 Talking during a test or an exam to give you an advantage over other
 Not sitting at the pre-assigned seat during a students in the grade-assessment process
test or exam  Refusing to obey the instructions of the
 Communicating with another student in any officer in charge of an examination.
way during a test or exam
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Tentative course lecture schedule:

Lecture Topics
1 Web applications, HTTP, design and architecture
2 Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML)
3 Java Server Pages (JSP), internationalization (i18n)
4 Structured Query Language (SQL), database access from JSP
5 Two complete examples: a bookstore and an auction website
6 Custom tags, XML, XML processing in JSP
7 XML Case Study: Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
Two complete examples: a news provider, and a news aggregator
8 Asynchronous XML and JavaScript (AJAX)
9 Web application security
10 – 11 Implementing services: session/message-driven MDBs, web services
12 Implementing entities: Java persistence
13 Principles of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

A Commentary on Course Evolution:

This course is generally considered a rare gem, in that it provides direct experience with technologies currently in
use in industry. Great effort has been spent by the instructor ensuring that the technologies and/or practices
discussed and used in this course are as up-to-date as possible. The result is that course content almost certainly
will change from one semester to the next. However, the negative side of this approach is that suitable textbooks
suitable for the course are impossible to find. Thus, the textbook(s) selected for this course represent a
compromise between breadth of content, and in-depth coverage for use as a reference manual when completing
the project.