7401ICT: Assignment 3

Due date

Midnight on Sunday 23 October 2011

Weight

30%

Task

Your task in this assignment is to refine and extend your solution to Assignment 2 (or my partial solution to Assignment 2) into a simple but potentially practical Web application or service.

For convenient reference, much of the following specification repeats what was required for Assignment 2. New requirements are emphasised. Submitting a solution to Assignment 2 is not sufficient to pass the assignment.

Functional requirements

• It must manage (at least) a set of categories, a set of items and a set of users. Each item is associated the user who created or added the item. Each user must have an associated profile.
• Categories may be created either by the administrator or by the set of users (in this case called tags), depending on the service. An item may be associated with exactly one category or with a set of categories, depending on the service.
• Each item must have a name, a description, a creator, one or more images, and other fields appropriate to the service.
• Users must be able to register, login, logout, view and change their profile, and change their password. Logged-in users should see a visual reminder that they are logged-in while they are logged-in.
• Logged-in users must be able to create new items and update or delete items they have created as appropriate for the service. (Update and delete commands should be on the item details page.)
• Administrators must be able to conveniently add, update and delete categories, items and users from the administrative interface, ensuring the database remains consistent when doing so.
• All users must be able to view recently added items, browse items in a particular category and search for items by name or description.
• Browsing and searching must return lists of item summaries. Each summary must give the item's name and other information appropriate to the service (but not full details of the item). Each such summary must contain a link to a complete description of the item.
• All (potentially long) lists resulting from browsing and searching must be paginated (but not the short list of recently created items).
• Logged-in users must be able to comment on current items. All users must be able to view comments made on current items.
• The service must use dates or datetimes in a nontrivial, interesting and practical way. (E.g., in an auction service, items are no longer for sale and bids may no longer be made after a closing datetime. Items may expire or become inactive at some point in time.)
• More generally, the service must provide some nontrivial application logic. (E.g., in an auction service, valid bids must be higher than the previous highest bid and must be made before the auction closing date.
• Users must be able to request an Atom feed of items currently in a particular category.
• The service must provide a clear, consistent, usable, two-column user interface, consistent with common practice, implemented using CSS positioning.
• The service must not deal with any relevant payment issues.
• The service must provide all natural and necessary features to be usable for its particular purpose.
• I reserve the right to add additional functional requirements within the next two weeks.

Implementation requirements

• Your submission must use a single Django project, one Django app for items and one Django app for user profiles.
• It must use URL patterns, models, views and templates. You can use either user-defined views or generic views.
• All (generated) HTML documents must be valid HTML5 documents.
• It must use cascading style sheets to provide a clear, consistent, distinctive appearance. (But don't just copy my style sheet - write your own.)
• It must use JavaScript and Ajax to provide a richer user interface than is possible without them.
• It must use session variables to maintain state associated with a particular session.
• It must use transactions where appropriate to ensure data integrity.
• It must validate and sanitise all input data.
• It must be implemented to avoid XSS, SQI injection and CSRF attacks.
• It must use unit tests to demonstrate that either your item detail URL pattern and associated views are implemented correctly or, better, that your item update URL pattern and associated views are implemented correctly.
• It must use good program structuring techniques. As a minimum, all files should be well commented and, ideally, there should be no unnecessarily repeated or unnecessarily long code.
• For our convenience, (at least) the home page of your application must contain the name and student number of the developer.

Documentation requirements

Documentation must be in the form of one or more valid HTML5 documents that identifies the project, describes precisely what the project does (and doesn't do), summarises how to use the project, briefly describes the implementation of the project, and provides any other useful information about the project.

The project page(s) must contain link(s) to the documentation page(s).

Note that this is different from Assignments 1 and 2.

Suggestions

• Consider working from scratch, so you can learn from your past experiences and do it better this time.
• If you choose to extend your solution to Assignment 2, first make a copy of your solution:

  $ cp -pr assignment2 assignment3
  

  Then change every occurrence of "assignment2" in files in your assignment3 directory to "assignment3". Finally, clean up ore refine your solution (now called assignment3) before starting to extend it.
• Design, implement and test your extensions incrementally.
• Start by designing or extending the models that define your data. Then design the new URL patterns, the views associated with each pattern, the templates associated with each view, and so on.
• Remember: key debugging techniques are print statements and code elimination (using comments).

Clarifications and more detailed suggestions may be given in lectures and laboratories. Ask me if they aren't.

Assessment criteria

We expect the structure of your application to be clear, simple, standards-conformant, validated, and well-documented. We expect the organisation and English in your implementation and documentation to be of high quality.

Assessment of your assignment will be based on functionality, implementation, documentation and overall quality. We will award approximately 2 marks for identification and specification of an interesting, practical service, 18 marks for functionality, 4 marks for interface and interaction design, 4 marks for implementation quality and 2 marks for documentation. At least 12 of the functionality marks will be for work that extends what was required for Assignment 2.

Marking will be done more strictly than for Assignments 1 and 2.

Submission Instructions

• Ensure your database contains several items in at least two categories, and contains at least one registered user in addition to an admin user.

• Every student must send me an email from your University account stating that you wish to submit your assignment. The email must be prepared exactly as follows:

  To: r.topor@griffith.edu.au
  From: student email address
  Subject: 7401ICT Assignment 3 Submission
  

  The body of the email must contain the following:

  • Your official student name and number.
  • The exact path to your Assignment 3 project directory, e.g., /export/student/s1234567/7401ICT/assignment3.
  • The URL of your project home page, e.g., /home/.
  • The URL of your project documentation, e.g., /static/html/doc.html.
  • An admin username and password (preferably admin / admin) for your project.
  • At least one other username and password for a registered user who has added items to the database.
  • A zipped archive of your project directory, e.g., s1234567_assignment3.zip, as an attachment.

• I will then unzip your zipped archive in my own file system for testing and evaluation.

Other information

• Plagiarism will be dealt with according to standard University policy.
• All use of work done by others must be properly cited.
• Extensions will not be granted except for medical or other similar reasons.