B336 Assignment 3

Assignment 3

Title:

Independent research: Web Server-Side Programming Technologies.

Description:

Part I: Research and Report

You are a computer consultant. A company has hired you to make recommendations on which web server-side programming technology to to adopt in its web-site development. The following is the company's details:

The organization is a small computer hardware retailer named Adinco Computers. The company only has a basic web-site containing static information at the moment, but is planning to expand its web back-end services to include large-scale e-business operations within a year. The specific services it is looking to include are online merchadise ordering with payment processing, intergration with inventory database, customer relations management, and supply chain management. The company's current web-site is served through the Apache web server running on Linux hosted by an ISP.

The company has 5 employees. Three of the employees have good programming skills, and are familiar with Java, Perl and Visual Basic respectively. One of the employees is the system adminstrator and is familiar with Unix and MS-Windows system adminstration. The number of employees is not projected to grow in the near future.

The company is running on a very tight budget, and is looking for as much cost savings as possible even in the face of its web-site expansion plans. It is willing to have large scale investment in software only if there is forseable benefits coming from the investment, or there is savings in staff training time.

Your task is to summarise a few alternatives to web server-side programming technologies the company may adopt. For each alternative technology you present, you must list (or discuss if necessary) its advantages and disadvantages in regards to:

cost

support for the technology

staff training time

what the technology can do, and

special features not found in other technologies

This assignment is to test your understanding of server-side programming technologies for the World-Wide Web. It also tests your ability to independently gather and assimilate information on alternative computing solutions to ones that you already know.

You have already learnt CGI using Perl as a web server-side programming technology in B211 Internet Computing. Therefore, you may not select CGI as a technology to report on. You will also be introduced to PHP and ASP in week 10 to 12. You may choose to report on PHP and/or ASP only if you submit your assignment before the start of week 10 (Mon 6th May 2002), before the lecture and lab material on PHP and ASP is made available.

Your recommendations must not be more than 5 pages in length. You may choose any 3 technologies to report not - they do not need to be ideal for the organization's purposes. The purpose here is for you to demonstrate you are able to find out and understand the technical issues dealing with using the alternative technologies. You may choose to reject all the alternatives you present, and recommend the organization adopt CGI as they originally planned.

Submission Requirements:

You must provide the following :

A report no more than 5 pages, as described above.

A bibliography section listing all your sources of information.

Cover sheet.

Part II: Learning to Learn (5%)

Read the Learning to Learn document, and complete the information in the two forms:

Plans. (2%)

Evaluation of plans and methods. (3%)

Submission Dates

Submit a copy of your plans (part II a) directly to your tutor before or during week 11. Internal students may do so during your lab sessions. External students may email a copy directly to your tutor. External students should ensure you receive and save the email message sent by your tutor acknowledging he/she has received your assignment.

The whole assignment (including part II a) is due at 12noon Tuesday 28th May 2002 (week 13). Internal students must submit their assignments to the School of IT's assignment boxes. External students must submit through the External Studies Office.

As indicated above, you may choose to submit this assignment early before week 10. If you decide to do so, you do not need submit the plans before you submit the final assignment. You will still need to complete the relevant forms in Part II though.

Learning Objectives:

The principle objective of this assignment is to assess your ability to do independent self-learning (Objective 4 of this unit's learning objectives). Besides that, the assignment also assessed your progress in Learning Objective 1 (understanding technologies).

To do well in this assignment, you should strive to demonstrate achieving the stated objectives.