CS320 S05 HW1

Homework 1
CS320, Spring 2005

Due: Thursday, April 14

Please upload your files using the online turnin server. The files should include all the source code, documentation, and an HTML file hw1.html, which contains a link to your servlet on the CS server. Note that file uploading will be disabled automatically after 11:59PM of the due date, so please turn in your work on time.

[Reading]

Textbook Chapter 1, 3, 4, 5, 19 except 4.7.

[Bulletin Board] CSULA ACM Forums use phpBB, a web bulletin board application written in PHP. For this assignment, you are going to implement a simplified web bulletin board using servlet. Specifically,

(10pt) The bulletin board consists of two forums, CS 320 and CS 491. When the servlet is requested without any parameters, it displays the list of the forums like the following:

Forum	Topics	Posts
CS 320	3	5
CS 491	3	3

(30pt) A user may click on one of the forums, in which case, the servlet displays the topics in the forum. For example:

Topics	Replies	Author	Views	Last Post
Tomcat Installation Problem	1	John Doe	8	Tue Apr 05 10:03:33 PDT 2005
Please HELP!	0	Somebody	6	Wed Apr 06 14:08:49 PDT 2005
Unable to Login the Turnin Server	1	cs320stu00	2	Thr Apr 07 21:09:20 PDT 2005

For simplicity, in this assignment we will leave out the feature that allows a user to create new topics. However, your should have no less than two pre-set topics in each of the forums.

(40pt) A user may click on one of the topics, in which case, the servlet displays the posts under the selected topic, as well as a form that allows a user to reply to the topic. For example:

Author	Topic: Tomcat Installation Problem
John Doe	Tomcat is running but when I try HelloJSTL.jsp, I received the following exception: org.apache.jasper.JasperException: The absolute uri: http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core cannot be resolved in either web.xml or the jar files deployed with thisapplication
cysun	Please check whether jstl.jar and standard.jar are directly under tomcat/common/lib

[NOTES]

The easy way to start this application (or any other web application for that matter), is to seperate the business logic and the presentation part of the application, and start with business logic. In particular, the business logic of this application consists of the followsing classes: BulletinBoard, Forum, Topic, Post, and User. Once the business logic is completed, the presentation part, which is the servlet, is quite straight-forward -- simply create an instance of the BulletinBoard class as a class variable of the servlet, and display or update the content of the BulletinBoard based on user requests.
Since we have not covered databases yet, the content of the bulletin board may be lost after the servlet is unloaded or reloaded. That's ok for this assignment.
Our subsequent homework assignments will be built on top of this assignment, so make sure your design of the bulletin board, especially the business logic part, is extensible.