Java or JSP project

Baz_

I have to do a project, and it is better for it to be internet based. My lecturer has suggested java as the language, which means applets or servlets or jsp's (and possibly more than that).

My problem is that I have no idea what sort of a problem would be suitably solved by java.

What I'm looking for are ideas. I was thinking of doing a bulletin board system, but I'm not sure if it would be ideally implemented through java.

Its for third year, so it has to be reasonably demanding to get any marks.

I'm just looking for ideas though, so no "No homework please" posts. Just one sentence ideas.

Snaga

Well the frontend id going to be basic html right? In that case java servletts would probably do the job nicely for you.

For a bulletin board keep it all server side and just spew html

Baz_

sounds good, I went to the library and had a look at servlets all right, and they do sound ideal, but if anyone has any other suggestions I'll not be starting until tomorrow. Im going to see monsters inc. you see. All suggestions greatly accepted, and ta snaga for your input.

Enygma

Take a look at Jive (http://www.jivesoftware.com) for an idea of how to do a sweet bulletin board in Java.

If you're looking to do something beefy you could build a tag library and API for a BBS.

scojones

why not do a java-based irc client. That'd get you the marks.

viking

Originally posted by Snaga
Well the frontend id going to be basic html right? In that case java servletts would probably do the job nicely for you.

For a bulletin board keep it all server side and just spew html

Separate out your business logic from your presentation layer. For example, servlets to do the heavy back-end processing, and JSPs to handle the presentation layer.

If you use servlets to spit out HTML, then you are required to do a recompile of your .java file (and server restart) if you make a change to the HTML. Whereas if you use JSPs for the presentation layer, any change to the JSP code is automatically compiled by the server (no restart).

viking

Snaga

ups, I got my jsp's and me servlets mixed up.

What viking said

phobos

Em, having a fair bit of experience with Java, I don't really understand why you would code your business logic in servlets and then use JSPs for presentation. Because TBH both technologies are used for pretty much the same thing, it's implementation that's different. With servlets you are effectively writing java classes with embedded html, and with JSPs you are writing a html document with special embedded jsp tags, that get compiled and executed in a servlet container on the web server. Both do exactly the same thing, which is return html/client scripts to a browser. But with JSPs you can separate business logic from presentation, by using beans. It would be there I would code your core logic.

Actually if you wanted to do a full scale J2EE project (which this project is heading anyway), you could code your logic in EJB (Enterprise Javabeans, which is an example of component middleware). This is what I did for my 3rd year project, and I got full marks for my efforts. It requires a bit of reading, but there are examples you could use on java.sun.com that would get you full marks. Just make sure you understand how everything works though, because enterprise computing is a fairly hectic part of software development.

Right, they're ya go, I probably went completetly off topic, but if you listen to anything I have said, you should do OK.

;-phobos-)

Gavin

j2ee might be slightly overkill for a bulletin board. Plain JavaBeans would work just as well.

Gav

phobos

Oh you are probably right that J2EE is overkill for a BBS, but I thought the project was open to anything that had a web interface. Actually one thing I found about doing projects in college is not to advertise you project as "The (X) program" for example. X being any program. If I was to write a BBS system for a project I would say that I am developing a web applications that implements JSPs/ Servlets and possibly a RDBMS. It's all about the buzz words (E.g J2EE), how easy or hard they are to implement is another thing, but lecturers love buzz words. I and others before me proved that in my college.

;-phobos-)