Final Year Project

This post and many preceding it will discuss my final year project undertaken in 2010.

The purpose of these posts will be to document the steps I have undertaken, problems encountered and steps taken to overcome.

The first stage of the project was to decide on a broad topic my project would be about, as the technology world involves rapidly, not just hardware but software as well. The world is becoming "more connected", most of us walk round carrying not just a phone but a smart-phone, we are connected to the internet almost 24/7.

Because of this always connected way of living, the web is starting to develop to meet a greater need. I am inspired by this and wanted to develop a better understanding of existing technologies, and new technologies that are being developed at present. For this reason I decided to pick a web based topic.

After this decision had been made, I had to pick a specific idea, to reach this decision I trawled through ideas recommended by lecturers at my university until I found one that caught my eye.

"Treepad/Hyper-pad/Webpad (some possible names for the idea) [Project identifier kit.lester_104]

A program (combined editor and viewer) for taking and organizing notes.

When I'm collecting and classifiying information, in preparation for writing (say) some course notes, I need to collate all sort of scraps, and organize them. Usually, I want to organize them as a tree, with each node of the tree being a list of items, each item being either text or a sub-node. I often need to move information (= a subtree) easily from one node to another. Sometimes I need cross-links that go beyond the tree structure. The sort of dynamic navigation found in MS-Windows "favourites", or Netscape/Mozilla's booklists would be one possible organization, though adding to the organization would need to be much easier than those examples.

No doubt many of you have had the same need when preparing essay-type courseworks.

Just such a program, on it's own, would be a limited project topic, lacking the scope for a high grade: the degree-worthiness would come from extras. A very obvious "extra" these days would be making the resulting notes file available on the web: with the file in html or xml, browsable (read-only) and directly editable on the web. That last issue would imply "protection" issues, to ensure that two clients do not get into a mess by trying to edit the same part of the same notes at the same time. Other degree-hard "extras" could be imagined.

All that to be done with a nice windows interface. Ideally, platform independant."

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~lesterk/projects/index.html

I chose this idea as it would allow for the creation of a web app with possibilities only limited by the time I have allocated, and the limitations of the languages I planned to use.

The next stage for the project was to research into existing products that performed a similar task