CS320 HW1

Homework 1
CS320, Spring 2006

Due: Thursday, April 13

Please upload your files using CSNS. 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.
Java API Documentation for Date, Calendar, and SimpleDateFormat

[Blog Application]

For this assignment, you are going to write a servlet that implements a simplified blog application. If you have never written a blog before, you may want to check out some blogging sites like www.blogger.com and see what blogs are and how blog applications work in general.

(10pt) The blog application, which we will refer to as the Blog Manager, manages two blogs: Instructor's Announcements and Student #31's Blog. When the servlet is requested without any parameter, it displays a page that looks like the following:

Welcome to CS320 Blogs

(40pt) A user may click on one of the blogs, in which case, the servlet displays the posts (or blog entries) in that blog. For example:

Instructor's Announcements

Tuesday, April 4, 2006

Homework 0 Due Tonight at 11:59PM
Please upload your files on time.
Posted by cysun at 4PM, 2 Comments

Sunday, April 2, 2006

Homework 1 Posted
Homework 1 is posted on the class home page. Please check it out and let me know if you have any questions.
Posted by cysun at 1:21PM, 0 Comments

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Homework 0 Posted
Homework 0 is posted on the class home page. It's quite simple.
Posted by cysun at 9:00AM, 0 Comments

Note that a post (or blog entry) consists of a title, a message, an author, the date and time the post was made, as well as zero or more comments. The posts are displayed in reverse chronological order with the most recent post displayed first. For simplicity, in this assignment we will leave out the feature that allows a user to create new posts. However, you should have no less than two pre-set posts in each of the blogs.

(50pt) A user may click on one of the Comments links, in which case, the servlet displays the comments for a post, as well as a form that allows the user to add new comments. For example:

Comments on Homework 0 Due Tonight at 11:59PM
cs320stu31 said: Can we get an extension? 4:30PM, April 4, 2006 cysun said: No. 5:01PM, April 4, 2006	Leave you comment: Username:

Note that a comment consists of an author, a message, and the date and time the comment was posted. Comments are displayed in the order in which they are posted. After a user adds a comment by clicking the Add Comment button, the comment should be displayed on the left-hand side of the comments page, and the comment count on the blog page should be updated accordingly.

[NOTES]

The easiest way to start this application (or any other web application for that matter), is to separate the business logic and the presentation part of the application, and start with the business logic. In particular, the business logic of this application may consist of the following classes: User, Blog, Post, and Comment. Once you have completed these classes, the presentation part, which is the servlet, is quite straight-forward -- simply create a few Blog objects (together with their owners, posts, and comments) as class variables of the servlet, and display or update the objects based on the HTTP requests.
Since we have not covered databases yet, the content of the blogs 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, especially the business logic part, is extensible.
Do not spend too much time on the user interface - we will do that in later assignments when we use JSP.