For the final project, you will build a site containing information
about a single movie director. You will pull the information
associated with the site off of the Web and organize it within your
own html directory.
The site will contain information about the director's life and the
films he or she has made.
The page organization can take any form you like, with one restriction:
pages for films must be dynamically generated. The "home page" for the site
should be html, as can fairly static pages such as the director's bio.
Any filmography pages, should be generated out of databases similar to
those used in the Virtual Museum project.
In particular, pages describing films should include dates, cast lists,
plot summaries, photos and/or poster shots, and any other information that
you find interesting. You should be able to search for actors, titles, and
keywords in plot summaries in much the same way as you searched in the
Virtual Museum assignment.
Your site should include a guestbook, and
visitors should be able to add comments or reviews
to specific movies that accessible from those movies' pages.
The pages should also use at least one element of JavaScript
covered in class
during 10th week.
You need only collect data on one director and ten movies.
In doing this assignment, we suggest the following steps:
Map out the pages on a sheet of paper.
Figure out which will be generated manually (with html) and which will be
the product of CGI.
Figure out what information has to be passed from the html pages to the
CGI scripts.
Gather the information you need to build the html and the CGI generated
pages.
Put together the html pages. Have them
call "dummy" CGIs that just print out
the values of the variable that they were called with.
One by one:
figure out what each script is going to generate,
figure out exactly what information it needs (text files and images),
organize that information to make it easy for the scripts to use,
write and debug the script.
Write the scripts one at a time!! If one script
produces a page that calls another, do the same thing you did when you
generated the html: call a "dummy" script that just prints out the values
of any variables it is called with. Do not work on more
than one script at a time!!!
In general...
Try to reuse your existing code... but only after
considering what that code does.
Talk to each other... but try not to spread faulty information.
Ask Jay, Robin, Kris, and Marcus questions.
If you post a question, give as much information as possible.
("The script doesn't run", "I get a syntax error", and "I get a Server error"
don't count as information.)
And when you figure out how to do something, help someone else do it too.
Also: On Friday the 13th, the 1:30 class will start at 12:30 and will
consist of debugging student code. All sections may attend.
