MSc project

Title: Elective submission using the google web toolkit
Supervisor: Dr. kit-ying hui (khui@comp.rgu.ac.uk)
Student: Jun Wu (1019157@rgu.ac.uk)

Key Techniques

• java programming
• web programming (e.g. HTML, CSS, JSP)
• Data modelling techniques

Background

Students in the school of Computing take a number of modules every semester. Some modules are compulsory while some are "elective". Depending on the course and stage (usually called a cohort), a list of elective options in order of preference. Currently this is done by submitting paper-based forms. Collected forms are then manually entered into a computer system before data can be utilised.

One obvious improvement is to antomate the process by using an online system to collect student submissions. Instead of having the traditional design of a web frontend connected to a database backend, the system can be developed to run on the "cloud". A cloud-based solution has the advantage of having no central server to maintain and it can scale up easily when demand increases.

The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a library for developint cloud-based "Rich Internet Applications" that run on the Google infrastructure. These applications, usually called Google Apps, are developed using the Java-based GWT library. Data, in the form of Java objects, can be stored on the Google infrastructure with encryption to ensure confidentiality. GWT also has an extensive API for connecting with other Google services ( e.g. Youtube, Gmail, Picasa web album).

Aim

To design and develop a Google App that collect student elective submissions.

Objectives

• To model and desing a database to store student elective submissions.
• To learn developing rich Internet applications using the Google Web Toolkit
• To connect the university's internal user authentication mechanism (LDAP - based) to the Google App that runs on the Google infrastructure
• To collect student elective submissions using a Google App
• To export collected data in formats which can be utilised by external programs

References

• The Google Web Toolkit site on Google Code:  http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/