Wednesday 13 December 2006

Week 12 - term one wrapup

There will be a lecture as usual on Friday. In this lecture, I will provide some general feedback on the assignment whilst it is fresh (burnt in?) in your minds. I will also go over the normalisation exercise which was left incomplete 3 lectures ago.

I will then introduce an exercise for the tutorial which uses PHP to process XML files and XML from a remote weather site. I think you will find this exercise simple but surprisingly powerful.

Finally we will have a poll to judge the best of the photo album sites. Make sure you bring your mobile phones because we will be using a SMS-enabled application to do this. There will a small prize for the best site.

MP3 lecture recordings

In addition to the slides and example material, the last two lectures have accompanying recordings which might be helpful, despite the ums and erhs and the poor referencing from speech to slides, if you missed either or both of the last two lectures. Please let me know if you find these resources helpful.

Friday 8 December 2006

Course work

I have added links to the group list to each of your mini Flickr implementations. I will be awarding a prize for the entry judged to be the best by us and you, so I encourage you to take a look at these some time in the next few days.

Week 11 - Moving from tables to Trees

In this session, I continue the work on tree structures by looking at the difference between table and tree structures as represented in XML format. We will look at some of the motivation behind the use of XML, in particular the problems with complex relational systems, the problem of data interchange and the emerging XML technologies.

Friday 1 December 2006

Week 10 - Trees , the DOM and AJAX

This week we will look at another key data structure, the tree . Tree structures are found in many places in computing, incuding filesystems and the structure of documents. We will look at some general aspects of trees and then look at how one tree, the DOM (Document Object Model) in a browser, can be accessed and updated using Javascript. The example we look at also uses a different client-server communication model called AJAX.