We will assume that students are sufficiently proficient already with UNIX and have enough programming experience to learn PHP programming language quickly. We expect the resources and links on the project pages will provide you with enough information to get you started even in case you are not familiar with either one. We also assume that students are proficient C++ programmers who understand and write C++ code quickly. Since the projects are very important part of the final grade and will take a signficant amount of time (especially the second project), we strongly discourage students from taking this class unless they feel comfortable with these requirements.
To help students set up the uniform environment for the class project, we will be using VirtualBox to run the Linux operating system in a virtual machine. VirtualBox allows a single machine to share resources and run multiple operating systems simultaneously. You will need to download the following files
The provided virtual machine image is based on Ubuntu 7.10, MySQL 5.0.45, Apache 2.2.4, and PHP 5.2.3, and g++ 4.1.3. If you have access to an equivalent machine that has MySQL, Apache2, PHP, and g++ installed, you may use it instead of the virtual machine image. However, please note that we cannot provide support for systems other than the virtual machine image, and that your project MUST be runnable on the provided virtual machine. We will be using the virtual machine image for grading purposes, and if your submission does not work within this setup, you may get zero points. We cannot make any exceptions to your project schedule for problems incurred by using your own computing facilities.
Your project is to build a Web site on movies, actors and their reviews, supported by a relational database system. Your system manages all of its data at the back-end in a MySQL database and provides a Web interface to the users at the front-end. While this task may sound daunting at first, you will be surprised how easy and helpful a commercial DBMS is for such a project.
To develop Project 1 all students will use the MySQL DBMS and the Linux operating system. You will also use the PHP programming language to access MySQL and the Apache2 Web server to provide a Web interface. While there are many other ways to develop Web applications, Apache and PHP is one of the most popular method these days to implement a database-backed server for a small-to-medium scale Web site, so we want our students to learn how to do it. We will provide online references that will help you learn PHP and MySQL. We will also give you a considerable amount of real data to populate your system.
For Project 1, we will expect certain minimal functionality in your system - beyond that, the sky's the limit. Minimal functionality includes a variety of queries and browsing capabilities over the data in your system, and the capabilities to enter new data. Various integrity constraints must be monitored. Although you will use MySQL, which has reasonable transaction support, multi-user issues are not a focus of the project. Project 1 consists of three parts:
In this part, you will get familiar with the overall project environment and learn the basic PHP and HTML if you do not know them yet. Under our provided virtual machine setup, you will have to create a simple PHP calcuclator application running inside the Apache server and accessible through a Web browser.
In this part, you will have to interact with the MySQL database to create tables, populate the database using our movie and actor data, add "integrity constraints" that the database should satisfy, and run a few SELECT queries. You will also learn how to connect PHP with MySQL, allowing a user to query the database through the website. A user of your interface should be able to execute SQL SELECT statments.
In this part, you will finally make user-friendly Web site for our movie database (a la IMDB.com), adding Web pages and functionality that are needed for database interaction. You will have to write a few PHP pages that execute various queries to find the information requested and to render the page in a user-friendly format. This is an opportunity for you to demonstrate some creativity and personal style. We may choose one or two outstanding projects for demonstration during one of the discussion sections.
key and value, and users can execute simple
queries on the tables. Your task is to implement the
B+Tree indexing module to process queries efficiently.
Your B+Tree implementation should be done in C++, which is the main
development language for Bruinbase. Be warned that developing correct
C++ code is significantly more difficult than any other language, and
you should be reasonably familiar with C++ to finish this
project on time. For example, you should feel comfortable dealing with
pointers, references, memory allocation and deallocation, file
input/output, and standard C++ classes such
as string and vector (string
and vector are C++ classes for string and array representation,
respectively). These are not
difficult to learn, but it takes time to learn to use them
correctly. All development should be done on Linux using
standard GNU development tools (g++ and make) within our
virtual machine.
In order to complete this project, you will have to first farmiliarize yourself with the existing code of Bruinbase, which is roughly 1200 lines of C++ code (700 lines excluding comments). Again, this won't be a very difficult task for most of you, but you will have to spend non-negligible time to understand the code well. In case you want to take a quick look at the Bruinbase code to evaluate whether you can do this project, you can download the Bruinbase code and read our description of the Bruinbase architecture. Roughly, you will have to first understand three existing classes, PageFile, RecordFile, and SqlEngine and then implement BTreeIndex class. If you find it difficult to follow the description and understand the Bruinbase API, you may find it extremely time consuming to finish Project 2. The project will be assigned around the end of the fifth week, and students will have about four weeks to complete the project.
If you do not have much prior experience, it can be daunting to take source that others wrote and understand its inner workings, but it is very important to learn how to read through a code base and get a feel for what classes are available. In particular, keep in mind that:
By doing a few C++ projects like this at school, we hope that students get enough experience to work on real-world project later on.
Students may implement the project individually or in teams of two. The choice is up to each student, but please keep the following rules in mind when you select your project partner:
An identical amount of work is expected and the same grading scale is used for individual and team projects. Faculty experience indicates that in general it is not necessarily easier or more productive to work in teams of two - it's largely a matter of personal preference and working style. If you choose to work as a team, you are encouraged to make use of collaborative authoring tools for synchronizing your work and ideas, such as version control software (e.g. CVS, SVN, Perforce) and online document tools (e.g. Adobe Share, Buzzword, Google Docs).
If you work in a team, choose your partner carefully. Teams are permitted to "divorce" at any time during the course (due to incompatibility, one partner dropping the course, or any other reason), and individual students may choose to team up as the project progresses, however students from divorced teams may not form new teams or join other teams. Put another way, if a student turns in any part of the project as part of a team, every later part of the project must be turned in individually or as part of the same team.
Both partners in a team will receive exactly the same grade for each project part turned in jointly. We will not entertain any complaints of the form "I did all the work and my partner did nothing." Choose your partner carefully!
If you work in a team, your work must be turned in jointly, as ONE submission. That is to say, only ONE of you two should submit your work as a team. Your team will get 10 points off as penalty if you violate this rule. Note that teamwork turned in as individual work will be considered as plagiarism and handled through official University channels.