You must complete this program with the same partner you had for "Laziness". This will be your team for the next few assignments.
This assignment asks you to write a web program. At this point in the course, the purpose of this assignment seems unclear. Once the assignment has been handed in, however, we’ll introduce an entirely new way of programming the web which is intimately linked with one of the fundamental ideas of programming languages. By completing this assignment now, you’ll be better prepared to appreciate this idea when we introduce it in class.
Though this assignment should not take you very long, we are giving you a lot of time because we know that not everyone is familiar with web programming; you may need to do some learning on your own. Furthermore, to avoid last-minute problems, this project has an early “Hello, World!” hand-in in which you must demonstrate you have a web programming environment set up.
Unlike the other programming assignments in the course, in this one you will be able to use a programming language of your choice. If you’re already familiar with web programming, choose a language that you’re comfortable with. If you’re not, the web is a font of meta-information, so you should have little trouble in finding resources about programming for it.
For example, your web program may run as:
We’re want you to get your web programming setup sorted out early. You must demonstrate that you have by creating a “hello, world!” web application. The application should show a web page with the text “hello, world!” and the current time and date.
We won’t require a formal handin for this. Instead, e-mail the me with the URL of your application and what language/environment you’re using. We must receive this e-mail by 2AM on the day after the due date.
You will write the authoring half of a simple blogging tool. (The publishing half that would complete the tool is outside the scope of this assignment.) Although this program is quite simple, it is representative of the core of much larger Web software (just as the interpreters we write in this course are themselves quite lean, but represent the core of large programming languages).
Weblogs (“blogs”) are web pages that consist of a list of posts ordered so that newer content is at the top. For our purposes, a post is a title, somebody text, and a post date. You must assume that the title and body are plain, ASCII-encoded text. In particular, this means that your software will need to escape HTML entities. For example, typing “<b>” into a text field should not make any part of the post bold.
The main page of your web application should have:
Upon submitting the form, the user should see a preview page that shows the post along with its date. The post is not shown on the main page until the user confirms it from the preview page, either through a link or a form button.
We do not require that you save posts to disk, but you may need to, depending on your choice of web application environment. We require that your web application pass this persistence test: a post added from one computer should be visible from the main page on an entirely different computer, if the web server has not been restarted. You do not need to worry about concurrent accesses (i.e. you need not lock any data files).