Software Engineering for Internet Applications - Student Community

flying you could say "A student pilot logs in [your teammate logs in],finds an article on flight schools in San Francisco [your teammatenavigates to this article], and posts a comment at the bottom abouthow much he likes his particular instructor." Then perhaps swappositions and your teammate comes up to say "The site editor [youswitch browsers to the one logged in as a site admin], clicks on thenew content page [you click], sees that there are some newcomments pending approval, reads this one from a student pilot, andapproves it [you click]." You return the browser to the public pagewhere the comment may now be seen in the live site.Close by parking the browser at a page that reveals as much of thesite's overall structure as possible. Don't despair if you weren't able toshow every feature of what you've built. Computer applications are allabout the tasks that can be accomplished. If you've made theaudience believe that it will easy to complete a few clearly importanttasks, you will have instilled confidence in them.6.24 Exercise 8 (for the instructor)Call up each team's clients and ask how strongly they agree with thefollowing statements:1. I believe that my student team understands my problem.2. I understand what my student team is planning toaccomplish and by what dates, right through the end of thecourse.3. My student team has been well-prepared for our meetings.4. My student team is responsive.5. I believe that the content management system my studentteam has built will be adequate to support the types ofdocuments on my site and the workflow required forpublishing those documents.6. I think it is easy for users to register at my site, to recover alost password, and that users are being asked all therequired personal information.7. I like the user administration pages that my student teamhas built.8. My student team has made it easy for me to check on theirprogress myself.9. My student team has kept me well informed of theirprogress.10. I am impressed by the clarity and thoroughness of thedocumentation prepared so far.11.4.6 Exercise 6: HotmailSuppose that Hotmail were an RDBMS-backed Internet service with10 million active users. What would be the minimum cost hardwareconfiguration that still provided reasonable reliability andmaintainability? What is the fundamental difference between Hotmailand eBay?Note: http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/webmail/ describesan Oracle-backed Web mail system built by Jin S. Choi.11.4.7 Exercise 7: ScorecardProvide a one-paragraph design for the server infrastructure behindwww.scorecard.org, justifying your decisions.11.5 Moving on to the Hard StuffWe can build a big server. We can support a lot of users. As thecommunity grows in size, though, can those users continue tointeract in the purposeful manner necessary for our service to be anonline learning community? How can we prevent the discussion andthe learning from devolving into chaos and chat?Perhaps we can take some ideas from the traditional face-to-faceworld. Let's look at some of the things that make for good offlinecommunities and how we can translate them to the online world.11.6 Translating the Elements of Good Communitiesfrom the Offline to the OnlineWorldA face-to-face community is almost always one in which people areidentified, authenticated, and accountable. Suppose that you're a 50-year-old 6' tall 250 lb. guy, known to everyone in town as "FredJones". Can you walk up to the 12-year-old daughter of one of yourneighbors and introduce yourself as a 13-year-old girl? Probably notvery successfully. Suppose that you fly a Nazi flag out in front of yourhouse. Can you express an opinion at the next town meeting withoutpeople remembering that you were "the Nazi flag guy"? Seemsunlikely.How do we translate the features of identifiability, authentication, andaccountability into the online world? In private communities, such ascorporate knowledge management systems or university coordinationservices, it is easy. We don't let anyone use the system unless theyare an employee or registered student and, in the online132217