January 13, 2014
February 11, 2014
June 10, 2014t
July 31, 2014
September 11, 2014
PLEASE READ CAREFULLY THIS SECTION!
The exam consists in the demonstration of understanding and command of the technologies we examined in the course. This will happen through the discussion of a final project. The project is INDIVIDUAL: no joint projects.
The project consist in a web application, which MUST to be divided into multiple tiers. The application domain can be anything of your choice: there are NO CONSTRAINTS about the project application domain. Try to be creative... There is NO pre-approval of your project idea. The ONLY requirement is to comply with the technical specifications given here.
There must be a web tier (implemented using JEE technology), a business logic tier (implemented using EJB) and a persistency tier (implemented with a database and accessed through an EJB3 persistency layer. The BL tier MUST be composed by both stateless and stateful beans - justification for the choices will be asked. The student will have to solve the problem of how to split the state persistency between the web session and the application server, and will have to justify the choices. Sensible use of EJB design patterns is required.
The system should show an as clean as possible separation between content and presentation.
The presence or absence of transactions must be meaningfully justified.
Sensible use of other optional technologies (whether they were discussed in the course, like XSLT, or not discussed) is not requested but it is possible and, in case, will be positively evaluated (see below).
During the exam students are expected to run the application on their machine.
Students will be asked to describe and demonstrate their system. They can be asked to explain or modify portions of their code. Questions about other technologies discussed in the course (such as Remote Objects, XML, CDI) will be asked - even if they are not used in an explicit manner in the project.
Students are required to send their project in a zip file to marco.ronchetti@unitn.it at least THREE days before the exam date. The zip file should include the source code, configuration files, and a report describing the project. The report should briefly describe the domain, the allowed operations, the system architecture and the used patterns. UML should be used. A suggested report template is available (see below).
A standard, well done, basic project (e.g. a web commerce site with a classical cart), without any extra technology will give a maximum score of 27/30. To get a better score you need to use additional technologies (e.g. at least one among ajax, xslt, jsp-custom tags, a desktop client accessing the EJB layer...), and run the application server outside the IDE, separating the web server from the app server and making good use of JNDI (that is, using a Tomcat and a separate JBoss or Glassfish, possibly - even though not requested - on different machines) . Choosing an original application domain and keeping a meaningful blog (where the progress of the work, the problems encountered and the solutions found are reported) can yield extra points. A nice look and an attention to the user friendliness will be positively evaluated.
Failure to respond correctly to questions, conceptual shortcomings in the implementation, failures in the understanding the used technologies on in the ability of explaining the choices and poor reports will of course decrease the score.
Please note that in order to get a full score (30/30) everything must be right on your first attempt. If you fail the exam, or if you decide to re-take it because you're not satisfied with your score, you will get at maximum 28/30. The rationale of this choice is that in the real world you rarely have a second chance, so you must learn to do things right and to evaluate yourself beforehand. The other reason is that if project you present is flawed and I suggest you the fix, it is unfair that you get the full credit fo the final solution. Also, do not ask me any pre-evaluation of what you've done: that would be a mild form of cheating.
Here you find a suggested template for the project report. You are free to use other schemas if you prefer.
To deploy your application on a separate Web Tier and Application Tier, read the following:
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