M9 -- Design Twist

Hotspots: Admin Pages | Turn-in Site |
Current Links: Case Final Project Summer 2007

Requirements

Use of a style sheet (css) to standardize look and feel
Use of query strings (?msg=111) to communicate information between the browser and web server
Use of session variables to maintain state between server calls
Static and Dynamic Web Pages
Use of forms to transmit data to the web page
Use of html include files for common data
Embedded smalltalk code (.ssp)

Comments

Having group members who do web development part-time as a job.
This project really asks for minimal work, most of the the stuff is covered in the Intro to CS course that everyone takes coming into Tech and everything else is covered on the slides. Even the Smalltalk code doesn't ask too much of the group, so there isn't a lot to do here, it just needs to all get done.
Embedding Smalltalk code was surprisingly easy, especially considering how annoying Visual Works was. This milestone was really a breath of fresh air.

Errors for the sites running in the Smalltalk server are propagated through the Smalltalk debugger. Half the time we missed errors and the windows didn't take focus so we spent 20-30 minutes wondering why things weren't working and just being all-together confused. Note this fact! It'll save you a lot of stress
We had to run this on one of our group members' laptops. You cannot run it at the CoC, users don't have rights to run a server. I repeat, you CAN NOT run this on a computer at the CoC on one of the machines. It will NOT work!

We should have started this project sooner, we waited until the last minute and then we weren't sure if we were doing things right and didn't have time to ask for help. We definitely regretted that choice.
We would not have tried to get the website to run on the CoC machine. That was foolish and a big time waster. DO NOT DO THAT!

Examples

Our website used entirely ssp pages so it requires a smalltalk server to be viewed, however the code can be found at the following link