Develop a Puzzle Website for users of three different age groups, Kids, Teenagers and Adults.

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Contents

1. Introduction

2. What was planned verses what was achieved.

3. Problems encountered.

3.1 Project Room

3.2 Zip Drives

3.3 Time Scheduling and Overrunning Tasks

3.4 Technical Problems        

4. What has been learned?

4.1 Technologies learned

4.2 Time Allocation  

5. What would you do differently?

5.1 The Use of JSP’s

What are JSP’s?

How are JSP’s (servlets) useful?

        5.2 Configuring of our own Client/Server Architecture

5.3 Flexibility

5.4 Better Time Scheduling

5.5 Website Design Aspects

6. Changes to the project since the design report.

6.1 Interface Changes

6.2 Games

6.3 Tools and Techniques

7. A technical description of the implementation.

7.1 Database Design 

7.2 Website Design          

7.3 Connectivity between Database and Website

7.4 Games Implementation

7.5 Testing the System

7.6 Usability Test Results

 8. Possible future enhancements.

8.1 Electronic Mail Service

8.2 Flash Macromedia

8.3 Instant Messaging Service  

8.4 Tracking of Games

9. Project Schedule

10. Conclusion

11. Acknowledgements

12. References

1. Introduction

        For our final year project in Commercial Software Development we thought it would be a challenging idea to develop a Puzzle Website for users of three different age groups, Kids, Teenagers and Adults.  This is to allow our users not to get bored with our website.  The more puzzling the better is our motto. Basically the aim of our project is to develop a website where you can get away from the stress and strain of school, college or work, play on-line and send us your suggestions and comments and you can even post up your own puzzle on our bulletin board. The main idea for the project came from a conversation we had one day bemoaning the lack of interesting sites or things to do on the Internet.

        Once you type in the URL of our site you enter the home page, which is just a basic explanation page of some of the games that we have in our game rooms. Then we have implemented links along the side to perform the basic functions of the site. After logging in, the different user selects whichever option they want and are then taken to the main logged in page. A record is kept in the database of all the users currently registered to the site.  The users have the option to send an e-mail to us or they can post a message on our bulletin board.  An administrator would be able monitor the game-rooms and in the event of a breach of regulations, effectively disallow that particular user from using it again. This person will have extra privileges and his/her responsibility is to monitor the usage of the facilities so that no misuse or abuse is taking place. The administrator is therefore hard coded into the database during the setup of the system to ensure the integrity of the administrator.  The Game developer also has extra privileges.

2. What was planned verses what was achieved.

        Our original project proposal to a large extent has been achieved.  At the project proposal stage, we only gave a brief description of our project (what it would consist of and what its functions would be) and the technologies that could be used.  The majority of functions in the system that we had planned to develop have, in the main, been developed but how we had planned to achieve it has been modified.

        We envisaged a system with a user interface that could easily be navigated and was intuitive. There are many mistakes to be made when designing and implementing a GUI. The implementation of the interface is an important phase in any software project. The user sees no code or scripts so their interface had better stand for all the work that they the developers put into the project.

We planned to implement the following features in our site.

                                                                   

3. Problems encountered.

        During the course of working on this project we ran into a number of different problems. Ranging from learning new programming languages to getting our project schedules right.  Here are some of the main problems that we had:

3.1 Project Room

        A major problem that we encountered at the beginning was the availability of machines on which to work.  We were competing with all other students of the college and as a result often had to queue for machines and maybe not get one at all.  This scenario persisted until the introduction of the AG05 room for all project groups.  This solved the availability of machines problem, but we had problems in logging in and some software was not available and had to be requested from computer services.  Another major problem that we had with working from the college computers was that we couldn’t do any of our research there.  All the puzzle and game website pages were all blocked.  This meant that we had to find alternative computers to do our research on.

3.2 Zip Drives

 

        Another problem was non-existence of Zip drives in Ag05 and many other computer rooms in the main campus. Ag05 was where we did most of their project work as the other computer rooms in the main campus were being used for classes. We needed to backup our work constantly so as to keep track of work in progress. Both members were working on different parts of the project simultaneously and it would have been very handy to pass a Zip disk over and back to provide a current constant backup. Floppy drives did not have enough space on them as the project grew in size.

3.3 Time Scheduling and Overrunning Tasks

        Probably the most challenging problem we ran into as a group was trying to organize a time schedule as it was sometimes difficult to timetable ourselves designated times to meet up and work together on the project as both members had many other responsibilities to attend to. This was especially difficult for us as we have a heavy workload with other subjects in our course that took up a considerable amount of time also.

        In addition, at the start of the year we sometimes found it difficult to get a lab free to work on the project, as there was either regular classes or night classes taking place. Thankfully through class persuasion we were assigned a designated project room in AG05, which made the task of scheduling a place to meet very easy as this room was always free. So any time we had free during the day we would timetable ourselves to meet there and work together on the project. This helped speed up the development processes no end.

        Another problem that we never took into account was the problem of tasks in the schedule overrunning. This had a severe knock on effect as it subsequently made the tasks after it overrun too. The task of coding the ASP and SQL that we had estimated to take two weeks over ran by about 3 weeks as we were having problems implementing the code. Which suggested we had to cut some corners to meet the deadline, through a project meeting we felt the best way to get around this problem was to drop a game from each of the different age groups.  We felt our project difficulty level was still high enough even without the extra games and that it would get us satisfactory marks.    

3.4 Technical Problems        

        Other problems we encountered were trying to find the best place to host our project, as it was web based we needed a host server. We went through a number of different ideas of where to host the site but we finally decided to host the web site on Brinkster as it appeared to be the best option, as it placed no adverts on our page, provided a code bank, an ASP forum, and appeared to be easy to use. We transferred our files using FTP namely our HTML pages, with little or no difficulty.  But when we proceeded to run the system we had problems with Brinkster. As there was no error messages provided and therefore we had no idea what was happening.  It didn’t tell us if it was a database connection problem, or a code problem, and this meant we didn’t know what to do to fix it. But through research and some tedious code analysis we finally resolved the problems.

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        Other technical problems involved us learning and understanding new technologies that we hadn’t seen before. These included ASP and Dream Weaver. And also we had to become much more competent in technologies we had previously done, like JavaScript, HTML, Access, SQL, Rational Rose, UML and Paint Shop-Pro.

4. What has been learned?

        During the entire project we learned how to communicate and work together as a team. There were many ideas and thoughts that had to be discussed and decisions had ...

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