Programming Exercise Guidelines

Programming Exercise Guidelines

This course is programming intensive and three programming exercises will be assigned:

~~Exercise III: (13%) A location-based service using AJAX.~~

The guidelines of generic exercise requirements and evaluations are as follows:

General Specifications

All students have to finish implementing the three programming exercises, but more requirements are for graduate students. If an undergraduate student finishes all requirements, no extra credits will be given to him/her.

Exercises have to be located at the following URLs:
and redirection (http-equiv="refresh") to the pages not hosted by http://undcemcs02.und.edu/~user.id/ is prohibited. That is, you can only use the facilities provided by the public Linux servers at the CEM to complete your exercises.

An e/m-commerce system involves a wide variety of software and languages, and the instructor shows reasonable ways to complete the exercises. In the past, few students wanted to use their own methods, which is fine, but it turned out they were wasting their time mostly because the methods shown by the instructor have been proved to be simple and effective, though the methods may not be fancy.

Students have to demonstrate their exercises to the instructor individually so misunderstanding would be minimized. An appointment is needed in advance. The instructor’s Zoom ID is https://und.zoom.us/j/2489867333 .

Exercises I & III: Electronic Commerce System Construction

Because of the limited resources provided by the CEM, fundamental tools such as PHP will be used for exercise construction. Though basic tools instead of fancy ones are used, it is believed that almost all functions of a database-driven website can be completed by using these basic tools. Fancy and basic tools mainly affect the front-end development like HTML and CSS. The most difficult part is the back-end development, which does not matter much whether fancy or basic tool is used.

Students have to post their code online so the instructor can download and execute it on his own computer if any suspicion.

Exercise II: A Mobile Commerce System Construction

This exercise also includes trivial web pages. They are for data input and checking and showing source code including Android.

Comments
Few comments are about the programming exercises:

According to a study, students in computer courses learn much more by building large-scale exercises instead of many small-scale test programs, which give fragmented knowledge contrary to solid understanding of the system.

Time management is critical for software development. If you are not able to complete the exercise, display whatever you have accomplished, so the instructor can give partial credit to your exercise.

Web, mobile, and database programming is a must for IT developers, and the only effective way to learn software development is practicing, instead of studying concepts or writing some testing programs.
No pain, no gain 😂
Web/app user interface is essential for software systems compared to native user interface.

Remote work is a trend for IT workers. This course also allows you to learn how to do it by using the VPN (virtual private networks) to connect to our Linux server undcemcs02.und.edu, and having the exercises set up at the server and be accessed from the clients.

The function of automatically sending emails or text messages is important for e/m-commerce systems, but will not be used here since companies complained our students sending out numerous mails or text messages because of faulty programs.

Security is critical for all websites. However, small or medium -size businesses do not usually implement their own secure payment schemes. Instead they use a third-party payment system such as PayPal or purchase software from company like Global Payments Integrated and integrate it with their websites. The same could be applied to networks.