[Year 12 Its] Programming for small devices

[Kevork Krozian]

Hi David,
 
  The portable device task can be done reasonably easily with java or a java IDE . No problems here.  I will have to add that an ex student of mine did do a similar assignment in 3rd year in his software engineering degree this year but I digress as how hard was this meant to be is another debate.
 I have used java as my programming language for the last 5 years. I have used vectors, binary files, lists and other objects to make the tasks realistic or challenging.
 
Back to Sofdev 2007. Keep in mind both programming tasks must be done with the same language. But ... consider the second programming task. 

This involves writing a program that will take into account a networked information system objective. Sounds innocent doesn't it ?
If you read the teacher's advice the sample task is a doctors' clinic ( a couple of doctors, nurses and receptionists ) a small LAN with a fileserver ( starting to look like client server ... ) with patients coming in for appointments and a database of patients and their appointment details on the file server ( looks like a relational database now with a 1 to many relationship of patients to appointments) all accessible from several workstations. It would be normal enough to expect concurrent access and shareability of the database ie. We don't ask the nurse to get out of the program when a doctor wants to use it. 
Looking around, I did consider java but it is too much to manage the multi client server access requirement. So what to do ?

Thinking through we all use multi user concurrent access all day every day . Where ? On a web server, we access the same page concurrently and are totally unaware of it. Eg. booking a computer room on the intranet, logging a computer fault, etc. all the time and if we have a database behind it, we then have the concurrency managed by the web server and the ODBC or other database driver eg SQL server 

So for the above reasons I have switched to PHP and MySQL for next year for sofdev and also for year 11 . 

For those interested I will be delivering some PD through VITTA early next year on using this approach of PHP and MySQL in several 2 hour block sessions.

I would be happy to hear any comments about these issues.

Kevork Krozian
Mailing List Creator and Administrator
kevork at edulists.com.au
www.edulists.com.au
Tel: 0419 356 034
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Mills, David J 
  To: is at edulists.com.au 
  Sent: Monday, December 18, 2006 2:58 PM
  Subject: [Year 12 Its] Programming for small devices


  For all those teaching Software Development next year - the focus of Unit 3 Outcome 2 is to "On completion of this unit the student should be able to produce a software module suitable for implementation on a portable computing device, in response to a design specification, verify its performance against this specifi cation and explain how the program has taken into account an ethical dilemma or a legal obligation."

  The new NetBeans 5.5 release has a mobility pack that allows you to develop and test Java applications for mobile devices such as phones and PDAs.  The software created can be installed on a suitable device such as a phone and used by you or the students.

  The software you will need (all of which is legally free) is:
    a.. Java's Software development kit (available from java.sun.com) 
    b.. NetBeans 5.5 (available from netbeans.org) 
    c.. NetBeans Mobility Pack (from the same location)
  When testing the software the Development environment opens up a window that looks like a phone (you get to choose whether you are developing for a phone or a PDA and you can specify the screen resolutions of your device) and you click the keypad buttons on screen to emulate the phone's behaviour.

  Cheers,

  David.


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