CISC 370 Term Project Resources for Spring 2000

Term Project Ground Rules

• Term projects may be done in teams of two or alone. For team work,
  • Hand-in one copy of required work with both names
  • Each team member is expected to do an equal share of the work
• You may use existing code in your project as long as
  • You do not violate any copyright laws
  • You give full credit to the source of the code (otherwise representing other's work as your own is plagarism).
  • You add something significant and the part that you add is clearly indentified.

Term Project Mile Posts

• Mile Post 1: Due Thursday, April 27:

  At this mile post you must have completed a significant portion of the initial design. This can be demonstrated either by turning in a definition of all the classes to be included in the final project that includes the data description and prototypes for all the significant methods or by turning in a complete initial implementation of some important piece of the overall design with a paragraph or two to explain its purpose and what additional is to be done.

• Mile Post 2, Thursday, May 11:

  Full initial implementation due. Does not have to be debugged or running. Main purpose is to show that entire project has been planned along with an initial implementation.

• May 25 & 26: Term projects due.

  A completed term project consists of all code plus relevant documentation that clearly identifies what you have done, what code/ideas you have borrowed from other sources with a complete reference to each source (i.e., an bibliography). Documentation must also clarify design and coding for the grader (BFC). The documentation should point out features of your design and code that you think are noteworthy. This should include positive as well as negative attributes (I will count off less for negatives that you point out and are aware of).

  I will schedule 20-30 minute periods for each project to be demoed and explained on April 25 and 26. April 26 is the normal final exam day for this course. Send me email no later than Tuesday, May 4 that tells me when you have scheduling conflicts on these two days plus any preferred times for your demo/presentation. The available demo/presentation times can be viewed on the presentation schedule web page.

  Grades for your term project will depend primarily on the finished project and the demo/presentation, but the material handed in at each milepost will influence the final grade.

Term Project Proposal Guidelines

1. An overall description and specific objectives of the project.

2. What you expect to learn by doing the work.

3. What you expect to be significant. Which parts you expect to be difficult, which easy, and why.

4. A brief, first cut at the kinds of objects/classes that will be implemented for the project. Concentrate on the nouns (as opposed to the verbs) of the application so as to help lead to a better OOP design. The quality of your OOP design will be an important component of the final grade for the project.

5. Illustrative diagrams of the planned designs for GUI screens. Although not needed for the project proposal, consider how you might separate the visual part of the implementation from the underlying objects by use of the observer/observable paradigm leading to good overall code design.

6. Which Java APIs you expect to use primarily.

7. What existing work in Java that you know about that is similar to your proposed work. How you plan to take adavantage of existing work and how your term project will build on existing work.

   If, in fact, you will not build on existing work, but will redo an application from scratch, say this explicitly and explain why you are doing this.

8. A list of step-by-step project goals and a timeframe for completing each step.

9. A list of references of related work, places to go for assistance, etc. List both printed and web-based sources.

Term Project Grading Guidelines

Some Term Project Ideas

• A good source of ideas. For example, follow the link labeled "Mightier Than the Sword" for an example of a word processor written in Java. (Added 2 Feb 2000)

• A Bingo game . This web page also provides a good model for a term project write-up.

• A file displayer and editor for a new start-up firm NETeXc Information Services

• Animating data structures like 2-3 trees. See the article S. Moen, Drawing dynamic trees, IEEE Software, July 1990, pp. 21-28. and the references therein. See also http://www.go2net.com/internet/deep/1997/05/07/ for more related information.

• A calculator with a GUI interface

• A simplified web browser. See the article "Designing a Web Browser" by Pascal Ledru in the Java Developer's Journal , vol. 4, No. 4 (April 1999), pp. 54-56. See other issues of this Journal for additional ideas.

• A simplified Java development environment that has a window for editing source code with buttons for compiling, execution, etc.

• An Java I/O stream implementation similar to that in C++, but without the operator overloading.

• Games, especially ones that allow multiple players from different machines. You can use Java's RMI package to do this kind of thing. Here are some books with information on writing games in Java.
  • Developing Java Entertainment Applets, John Withers. Has a chapter devoted to the Gamelet Toolkit. See link below.
  • Cutting-Edge Java Game Programming, Bartlet, Simkin, Stranc
  • Black Art of Java Game Programming, Fan, Ries, Tenitchi
  • Teach Youself Internet Game Programming With Java in 21 days, Michael Morrison
  • Java Game Programming for Dummies (For Dummies), Wayne Holder, et al
  • Java Game Programming Starter Kit

• An online catalog using Java's RMI package

• 3-D applications

• MORE IDEAS TO COME!

Places on the web to browse for ideas.

• SUN's applet web page

  www.jars.com, a nice, well-organized site with many examples of applications/applets written in Java. Topics include business, science, games, financial, WWW, etc.

• A toolkit for developing games in Java .

• www.developer.com/ , another site with lots of Java examples.

• Gamelan: www.gamelan.com

• javaboutique.internet.com - lots of good informantion here.

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Copyright 2000 B. F. Caviness