I’m in my senior design class for a computer science degree. We have been assigned a client who needs a website where employees can log in, clients can log in, and has a front end/homepage for the world to see.
Well I’ve done none of this.
We appear to have elected to use Primefaces, but I don’t even know what to do with primefaces?? Initially it appeared as if you could build the homepage with it, but after fooling with the “showcase” primefaces offers, you can really only build DB access fields, and similar. I don’t see how you would create the front page with it.
I only know Java.
So do you know what I can be doing? I’ve been placed on the “backend development team”
Whatever info you provide will be all I receive - the school has, and will, teach me nothing. Just me and Google to create a university level website. They have taught me approximately 2 semesters of Java 2 years ago, and that is all. I haven’t taken any Web classes, other languages, and very little algorithm analysis.
I never heard of primefaces before today, but it looks like it’s a spinoff of YUI, which is a powerful but not terribly popular javascript library for client-side scripting. So, if you want a popup calendar to help someone enter a date, or want to make page elements change without reloading the whole page, it’s probably good at that.
But it sounds like most of what you need to do is server-side stuff. Never, ever trust a client-side tech to handle authentication. Plus, you’re apparently on a back end team, which should be focusing on the server bits.
So, if I’m gauging this correctly, it looks like you’ll need to learn several new languages and libraries in order to finish the project… html, css, javascript (or some sort of library/wrapper for it), the basics of HTTP and/or REST, a server-side web framework, whatever template language the web framework uses, SQL or whatever ORM the web framework uses, and maybe other stuff too. Kind of a big task for one class.
The other students know just as little as I do. We all came up thru the same program, watching teachers hand out A’s like candy, or handing out F’s then curving final grades, and teaching us virtually nothing in the process. Like currently I’m Calculating betweeness, Closeness and degree centrality of nodes in graphs. Or in another class I am regurgitating French rail ciphers, or Caesar ciphers. In a 3rd class I am discussing what the different ramifications between full, limited and partial disclosure of exploits are.
Last Semester i had an entire class on flow charts, data diagrams and UML. In a different class one guy just missed an A because he didn’t know that fork() was the correct method to create a new process in UNIX-not that we did anything in Unix… It was just a test question.
Back in the first year or two we shifted bits by hand, and converted hex to octal and back to base 10. I had two java classes - 255 & 256, and I did write code, create classes… Even learned recursion. But it was two years ago and was only for 12 weeks per class-very little exposure. Touch and go really.
Needless to say i dread that first job interview or job- they are going to wonder what I’ve been doing the past 4 years, because I suspect it will become quickly apparent it wasn’t coding.
Most of what you said was gibberish, other than HTML (which I don’t know) but I do know we’ll be using MySQL for the DB.
I must say… I was pretty embarrassed by most of my graduating class, who generally didn’t even know what a Makefile was after doing C on unix systems for 4 years. But at least we wrote code in almost every class, and that code was required to actually work. The most useless class I took was the one on flow charts and UML (which was required for the degree). The hardest class was the one which started out with “Welcome. You have six weeks to write a raytracer with at least two randomly-assigned features not yet available in commercial renderers. Go!”
At least everyone is in the same boat, it seems. You can’t be blamed for not knowing things nobody ever bothered to mention, and if everyone complains about it perhaps the teacher will try to adapt the course requirements.
The vast majority of my college education happened outside of class though, where I was running a unix lab and gradually building my own free software distro on top of a proprietary OS, and spent my free time contributing to open-source projects and reading tech news. Even got myself into slashdot articles a few times. It’s a good thing, too, since in my field one needs a portfolio rather than a degree. The content of my classes was mostly inconsequential.
Hee heee… can I get an “A” for my real-time ray tracer? It once took 4000 250 Mhz pentium systems to run… and was way cool… except for the nearly 1 megawatt of power it sucked.
Pshaw… the first realtime raytracers ran on a 486 in the 90s. Granted, they ran at a rather low resolution and the frame rate was low, but at least it worked.
Mine wasn’t fast, but it could focus (or defocus) using an optical model of a lens, it did barrel distortion, and it could handle negative lighting (like the “flashdark” or “Bob’s flashlight” discussed in another thread). And that probably identifies how long ago it was written…
