University of Montana ScholarWorks at University of Montana Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers Graduate School 2001 Design and implementation of a web server application for students to submit assignments Yuehua Yang The University of Montana Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Yang, Yuehua, "Design and implementation of a web server application for students to submit assignments" (2001). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 5504. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/5504 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Maureen and Mike MANSFIELD LIBRARY The University oIVIONXANA. f Permission is granted by the author to reproduce this material in its entirety, provided that this material is used for scholarly purposes and is properly cited in published works and reports. ** Please check "Yes" or "No" and provide signature ** Yes, I grant permission No, I do not grant permission ______ Author's Signature 1 ° * ^ _______ Date A jy f H . 2 6 , 2 ^ > ) _________________________________ Any copying for commercial purposes or financial gain may be undertaken only with tire author's explicit consent. Design and Implementation off a Web Server Application for Students to Submit Assignments By Yuehua Yang B.Sc. University of Anhui Agricultural Science, China, 1981 M. Sc. Graduate School, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science, China, 1986 Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Computer Science Department of Computer Science, The University of Montana April,2001 DeSan, Graduate School UMI Number: EP40968 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL U SER S The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMT Dtanrtation Publishing UMI EP40968 Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code Pro^^f ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Yuehua Yang M.S. April, 2001 Computer Science Design and Implementation of a Web Server Application for Students to Submit Assignments Chairperson: Alden Wright This project is a software engineering approach to the design and implementation of a web server application for students to submit assignments. During the design and analysis of the project, a requirements document, high-level use cases and expended use cases documents, class diagrams and sequence diagrams have been finished. The project uses Java servlet programming to implement the application system. There are two parts in the application system, an instructor part and a student part. For an instructor user, the system allows the instructor to set up a course for students to submit their assignments. The system allows the instructor to set up and to modify the assignment size limitation, to edit the course and student passwords, to check student submission information online, and to delete a student account. The system also allows the instructor to delete his/her course account. For a student user, the system allows each student to set up a password-protected account for assignment Submission. Students can submit their assignments online after they set up their account. The system also allows students to edit their passwords. A web demo of the project has been set up. All of the functionalities in the application work. The design and implementation of the project is summarized in the paper. Some questions and experiences with the design and implementation of the project are also discussed in the paper. A recommendation for future work has been suggested. From this project, I learned a lot of software engineering methodology, from requirements analysis, to elicitation of use cases, to architecture and detail design of the project, to extraction of sequence diagrams and class diagrams. Through the project, I increased the abilities of solving technical problems, which were not familiar areas to me. All of these experiences are very helpful for me to continue to work in the J2EE area. Acknowledgment I would like to thank my advisor Dr. Alden Wright for his assistance, support and encouragement. I would also like to thank Dr. Joel Henry and Dr. Lee Tangedahl for their helpful suggestions. Contents 1. Introduction ....................................................................................................... 1 2. Background ........................................................................................................ 2 3. System Support ................................................................................................. 9 4. Software Development Approach .,....... 10 5. Development Processes ............................................................................... 11 5.1 Requirement Analysis ............ 11 5.2 Design ........................................................................................................... 14 5.2.1 Class Hierarchy ...................................................... 14 5.2.1.1 The Architecture of the Web Server Application System ....... 14 5.2.2 Database Table Design ............................... 16 5.2.3 Sequence Events of a Use Case ........................................................ 17 5.2.3.1 Use Case of “Set up a course” ......... 17 6. Implementation ................... 19 6.1 Coding Languages ........................................... 19 6.2 Coding and Test ........................ 19 7. Discuss ........ 21 7.1 Servlet Programming and Object Oriented Design ..................................... 21 7.1.1 Require/response Oriented ...... : ...................................... 21 7.1.2 User-friendly Interface Design ................................................... 22 7.2 UML for Web Application ............................ 22 7.3 Database Connection .................................................................................... 23 7.4 What I learned in the project ........ 24 8. Summary ............. 26 9. Bibliography ................ 28 10. Appendix A Project Requirements ................................................................... 29 11. Appendix B High-level Use Cases ............ 35 12. Appendix C Expanded Use Cases ............. 37 13. Appendix D Class Diagram .................. 45 14. Appendix E Sequence Diagrams ..................... 49 15. Appendix F System Installation Instruction .................................................... 59 16. Appendix G Project Proposal ...... 68 17. Appendix H A Real Configuration File of srm.conf ...................................... 73 18. Appendix IA Real Configuration File of jser.conf ............................ 78 19. Appendix J A Real Configuration File of jser.property ...................................... 80 1. Introduction The Internet and the World Wide Web have experienced explosive growth over the past decade and are now positioned to provide a wide range of services. Computers have become and will continue to be part of our everyday lives. More and more individuals, organization and business use networks to get and send information. Generally, when a student takes a course in a university, he /she has to finish the required assignments and to submit them to the instructor. In computer-related courses, assignments are often submitted electronically in the form of computer files. Traditionally, when a student wants to submit an assignment electronically, he/she has turn in a floppy disk, to send the file to the instructor by email dr to copy the file to a course directory, which has been set up for that purpose. However, there are four major problems with these methods of submitting assignments: (1) If the floppy disk submission method is used, the instructor has to retrieve the assignment from one floppy disk per student, which will take the instructor a lot of time because the machine reads a file from a floppy disk much slower than from a hard disk. Also, both students and the instructor have to use the same format system to write and read a floppy disk. (2) If the email submission method is used, the instructor has to deal with a large number of email messages, which contain student assignment files. It is not surprising that the instructor may receive more than one hundred emails in a 50-student course for an assignment. A student may send several modified assignment files for an assignment. The instructor has to save these files to a directory and verify and delete duplicate submissions. (3) If the copy-file submission method is used, the student must have an account on the machine where the instructor asks students to copy their files to a course directory. The students can go to the course directory and view other students file information, such as who have submitted their files and when the files have been submitted. Because of this security