Assignment 3, Milestone I

November 1, 2008 | Filed Under Announcements 

I have posted Assignment 3 and have uploaded a ZIP that constitutes Milestone I of Assignment 3:

http://e168f08.plugh.org/assignments/assignment-3-2/

— and the ZIP is on the downloads page

Shortly there will be more “to dos” and fresh ZIPs for Milestones II and III. Milestone III - a complete webapp - is what you’ll be handing in on Nov. 23 Dec. 7.

The first two milestones are:

Milestone I: This is what the posted assignment and ZIP are about. For this milestone, you will create migrations and add validations and associations to models so that tests pass. If you’ve been reading along and watching the lectures, this should be about 2 hours of work; and, given that this is new to you, let’s double that for a more realistic appraisal for the amount of time it will take. I expect you to be done with it by Sunday Nov. 9. On Nov. 10 I will send around a ZIP that has the migrations, validations, and associations as I wrote them.

Milestone II: This will be a list of challenges to write finders against the database — all of which will be instrumental for Milestone III which will be the complete web app.

The final milestone is the actual web app, where we will hand out a skeleton of the app, and you will need to write certain key controllers and views. We will also run on the server (as we have done with linkwizz.plugh.org) a reference version of the assignment. Incidentally, there will be a written component to the final hand-in for Assignment 3. It will be lengthier than the writeup part of Assignment 2, and will ask you to answer questions about how you would expand the application in various ways.

This worked well last year — the only thing really missing is room for a lot of creativity, but that is what the final project is about.

I am also going to try to make you a screencast that shows me negotiating the project, making a rule or two pass. I think you will find this useful to understanding the work pattern.

Two requests:

(1) I know that some of you out there are jackrabbits who like to try and stuff done right away. If you do so, and have feedback for me, I’m all ears. These are not easy assignments to put together, and I would welcome any suggestions you’d have that would clarify the assignment description or the code bundle. On occasion students complain because we give out the code bundle in successive bundles, but there are almost always unanticipated difficulties owing largely to our own movement to the latest version of the framework.

(2) Look at your schedules. Right now the due date for Assignment 3 is Nov. 23 Dec. 7. Since I will be handing out the official schema on Nov. 10, that means you’ll have a day short of two weeks to do the assignment. I don’t like the idea of extending a due date over Thanksgiving, but in the interests of balancing the tempo of the course against the realities of lives and jobs, I’d like to know what you think about these deadlines. To be sure, there is an unknown factor for you, which is that you don’t know for sure how much work it’s going to be. But the staff and I will attempt to create the appropriate amount of work for that two-week period.

I think that’s it. For discussion, add your comments to the assignment #3 page.

John

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