Software Engineering for Internet Applications - Student Community

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The magazine is ineffective for start-to-finish learning. It is impossiblefor Popular Photography to sell enough ads to run a 20-page tutorialarticle much less a complete beginner's textbook on photography.The magazine is ineffective for finding the average price for a used orobscure item (Shutterbug is the place for used and classic cameradealer ads).The magazine is ineffective as a means of getting answers toarbitrary questions. There is a "Too Hot to Handle" section in everyissue that promises "Honest, forthright answers to your most probingquestions." Unfortunately only four questions are answered per issue.Presumably these were submitted at least a couple of monthspreviously. And the answers come only from the editors of themagazine; they don't tap the reserves of knowledge that may resideamong the hundreds of thousands of subscribers.The magazine is ineffective as a means of exhibiting reader work.The "Your Best Shot" column displays five or six reader-contributedphotos in every issue but being selected is an slow and uncertainprocess.Example: face-to-face courseThe main strength of a face-to-face course in photography isguaranteed mentoring. The instructor keeps track of each student'sprogress and questions. Another strength of a face-to-face course isthe availability of critiques from other students and the instructor.Face-to-face courses require more travel, time, effort, andcommitment than many people are able to give. Once the course isover, the student is unable to avail him or herself of mentoring andcritiques from the instructor and other students.3.7 Exercise 2Write down the best features of offline alternatives for learning thesubject matter of the service that you're building. Indicate thosefeatures that you think can be translated into an online communityand, if so, how. Write a three-sentence justification for why youronline learning community will be an improvement over offlinealternatives for at least some group of people.3.8 Evaluating Alternatives: OnlineIn performing your analysis of online competitors you should look atany service or resources for learning in your subject area. But pay52You can work in all of the site's important features in such a scenariowhile giving the reader an idea of how these features are relevant touser and administrator goals.Note how the example above works in the mobile and VoiceXMLinterfaces of the site. All of your readers will have used Web sitesbefore but mobile and VoiceXML are relative novelties.17.2 What Do We Mean By "Professional"?What do we mean by "professional"? Does it even make sense in thecontext of software engineering? The standard professions (law andmedicine) require a specific educational degree and certification byother professionals. By contrast plenty of folks who never took acomputer science course are coding up a storm in Java right now.Nor has their work in Java been evaluated and certified by otherprogrammers. In theory, if your incompetence kills enough patientsyour fellow physicians can prevent you from practicing medicineanymore. If you steal too much from your clients, your fellow lawyersare empowered by the state to prevent you from working.Without a required educational program or state-imposed sanctionson entry to the field, what can it mean to be a "professionalprogrammer"? Let's take a step back and look at degrees ofprofessional achievement within medicine. Consider three doctors:• Surgeon 1 does the same operation over and over in aBeverly Hills clinic and makes a lot of money.• Surgeon 2 is competent in all the standard operations but inaddition has developed an innovative procedure and,because of the time devoted to innovation, makes lessmoney than Surgeon 1.• Surgeon 3 has developed an innovative procedure andpractices it regularly, but also makes time for occasionaltravel to France, China, Japan, and Argentina to teach otherdoctors how to practice the innovation.Most of their fellow physicians would agree that Surgeon 3 is the"most professional" doctor of the group. Surgeon 3 has practiced atthe state of the art, improved the state of the art, and taught othershow to improve their skills. Is there a way for a programmer to excelalong these dimensions?297
Try to make sure that your audience can stop reading at any pointand still get a complete picture. Thus the first paragraph or twoshould say what you've built and why it is important to this group ofusers. This introduction should say a little something about thecommunity for whom the application has been built and why theycan't simply get together in the same room at the same time.It is probably worth concentrating on screen shots that illustrate yourapplication's unique and surprising features. Things such asstandalone discussion forums or full-text search pages can bedescribed in a single bullet item or sentence and easily imagined bythe reader.If you find that your screen shots aren't very compelling and that ittakes 5 or 6 screen shots to tell a story, consider redesigning some ofyour pages! If it makes sense to see all the site's most importantfeatures and information on one screen in your overview document, itprobably makes sense for the everyday users of the site.You have two basic options for structure. If it is more or less obvioushow people are going to use the service, you might be able to getaway with the Laundry List Structure: list the features of theapplication, punctuated by screen shots. In general, however, theDay in the Life Structure is probably more compelling andunderstandable. Here you walk through a scenario of how severalusers might come to the application and accomplish tasks. Forexample, on a photo critique site you might show the following:2961. Schlomo Mendelssohn uploads his latest photograph of hisdog (screen shot of photo upload page)2. Winston Wu views a page of the most recently submittedphotos and picks Schlomo's3. Winston uploads a comment on Schlomo's photo, attachingan edited version of the photo (screen shot of the "attach afile to your comment" page)4. Schlomo checks in from his mobile phone's browser to seewho has critiqued his photo5. Winona Horowitz calls in from a friend's telephone and findsout from the VoiceXML interface that a lot of new contenthas been posted in the last 24 hours6. Winona goes home to a Web browser and visits theadministration page and deletes a duplicate posting andthree off-topic posts (screen shot of the "all recentlyuploaded content")7. ...special attention to online learning communities. Before setting off tosurf, you might find it useful to think about the following principles ofsustainable online community:1. magnet content authored by experts2. means of collaboration3. powerful facilities for browsing and searching both magnetcontent and contributed content4. means of delegation of moderation5. means of identifying members who are imposing an undueburden on the community and ways of changing theirbehavior and/or excluding them from the community withoutthem realizing it6. means of software extension by community membersthemselvesWhen you visit a site ask yourself "Did they author or license asubstantial body of tutorial content?" Look at the ratio betweenpublisher-authored and user-authored content. If more than half ofthe content is authored by users the site is heading away frompublishing and toward community. Note the number of different waysin which a user can post some information that then becomesavailable to other users ("means of collaboration"). See whether thedefault search utility on the site returns results from things likediscussion forum postings. As an unprivileged user it will be hard foryou to determine whether or not the site has provisions fordistributing the content moderation burden or excluding difficultusers. However, you can sometimes make inferences about Element6, whether or not the software can be extended by people who areregular users and administrators of the community but aren't expertprogrammers. If the site is commercial check the job listings to seewhat skills are required. If the site hasn't adopted the abstract URLreligion (see "Basics" chapter) the file extensions may give you a clueas to implementation technology. A ".pl", ".asp", ".php", ".adp", or".tcl" indicates the use of a scripting language, amenable to programextensions by novices. A ".jsp" or the term "servlet" in the URLindicates the use of Java, a language that is intended only forprofessional programmers.3.9 Exercise 3Find the best existing online communities in your subject area. Notehow closely they conform to the six elements of sustainability listedabove. Also write down anything strikingly good or bad about theregistration process and the mechanisms of collaboration, e.g., indiscussion forums, comments on articles, and chat rooms. Look for53
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content that should distinguish one
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Chapter 13Planning ReduxA lot has c
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the Internet-specific problem of no
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wouldn't see these dirty tricks unl
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12.8 Exercise 4: Big BrotherGeneral
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A third argument against the split
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way 1 1/16One might argue that this
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What if the user typed multiple wor
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Chapter 12S E A R C HRecall from th
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long as it is much easier to remove
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features that are helpful? What fea
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made it in 1938)? Upon reflection,
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environment, we identify users by t
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those updates by no more than 1 min
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Balancer and mod_backhand, a load b
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translation had elapsed--the site w
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It seems reasonable to expect that
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11.1.5 Transport-Layer EncryptionWh
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such as ticket bookings would colla
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give their site a unique look and f
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It isn't challenging to throw hardw
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Chapter 11Scaling GracefullyLet's l
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10.15 Beyond VoiceXML: Conversation
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Consider that if you're authenticat
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In this example, we:194• ask the
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As in any XML document, every openi
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(http://www.voicegenie.com). These
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Chapter 10Voice (VoiceXML)questions
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9.15 MoreStandards information:•
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9.14 The FutureIn most countries th
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9.10 Exercise 7: Build a Pulse Page
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9.6 Keypad HyperlinksLet's look at
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text/xml,application/xml,applicatio
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Protocol (IP) routing, a standard H
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