CS 4604 Project Assignment 3

Preparatory Steps:

• Check out Project Assignment 2 solutions on the course website.
• Select one person in your project in whose directory you will create the files for the web interface.
• Create a directory called cs4604 in this person's home directory on cs4604.cs.vt.edu. You can log into this machine using your SLO id. You will be able to create/access this directory from any machine on the rlogin cluster as well.
• Make your home directory world-executable (chmod a+x ~) and the cs4604 directory world-readable (chmod a+r cs4604).
• Place all your scripts and files inside this directory.
• You can access your website at the following URL: http://cs4604.cs.vt.edu/~"selected person"/"start file name".php.

Help with PHP

• The PHP website
• The PHP manual The manual has a newsgroup-like facility with lots of potentially useful user comments.
• Introductions to PHP. Link 1, Link 2, Link 3.
• The TAs will be holding a short recitation in-class on April 20 (slides here).

Style Guide for your Application

What you should turn in

1. Every group has to turn in a project report. Email PDF version of your report to both the TAs by 12:00noon May 2 2016 with the subject header 'CS4604 Project Assignment 3'. Name the PDF as your-group-name.pdf. Please do NOT send any file format other than PDF. Also submit hardcopy in the May 2 class.
2. Every group has to give an in-person demo in a 10-15 min time-slot on May 3. This means that ALL members of the group should be present at the demo time-slot. If anyone misses the demo, we will grade that person's PA3 out of 33% (ie. whatever grade we assign to the team/3). Please write your group name and choose exactly one time-slot for the demo here: Project 3 Demo Schedule. Sign-up by 5pm April 29 (otherwise we'll randomly assign remaining time-slots to groups).

Late submission Policy

1. NO late days allowed on this assignment.
2. Assignment submitted late every 7 hours, will lose 25% of the grade i.e. if you submit between 12:00noon-7pm May 2, you will be graded out of 75 points, between 7pm-2am (May 3) 50 points, 2am-10am May 3 25 points. Anything submitted later than 10am EDT May 3 will not be graded.
3. How to submit late: Please email the PDF to TAs, and bring a hardcopy to your demo. Your submission will be timestamped according to the time of your email.

Also see below, for more information on what the project report and demo should contain.

What your project will be graded for

1. (10 points) First write and run the following SQL queries on your database. These are just sample queries to give you a sense of how SQL can enable some task for your application e.g. Query 1 below can help find recent publications for any author. For each of the problems listed below, show the following in your hardcopy:
   • Your SQL query,
   • The result you obtained,
   • The time your query took (use the \timing command in psql to obtain the time).
   While grading your solutions, we will pay attention to the quality of your queries, e.g., whether they are correct, the number of tables they reference, and the running time. Please desist from creating massive new tables to support answering these queries!
   1. (2 points) List the 10 latest publications by author 'Philip S. Yu' (without the quotes).
   2. (3 points) Conferences are important venues in computer science. Journals on the other hand are becoming less and less important. Nevertheless, scientists continue to first publish a paper in a conference and then submit a full version (with the same title) to a journal. Count the number of publications that first appeared in a conference (the type of such a publication is "inproceedings") and later appeared with the same title in a journal (the type of such a publication is "article").
   3. (5 points) Find the 10 scientists with the highest number of collaborators restricted to type "articles". For this question, two scientists have collaborated if they write at least one "article" together; the number of papers they have written together does not matter. The number of collaborators of a scientist is the number of other scientists he/she has written at least one "article" with. Return the author name and the number of other authors he/she has collaborated with, for the 10 authors with the highest number of collaborators.


2. (30 points) Does everything work correctly and do all the buttons and links that we click indeed do what they are expected to do? We will see if you are really accessing the database dynamically and are not just "looking up" the data from some ready made source. We will ensure this by typing ad-hoc queries. You will also need to make sure that all query results have column names neatly presented and that data is clearly tabulated.


3. (20 points) A project report where you summarize all steps of your project in a single document. If possible, include snapshots of your web interface. This report can be easily created by cutting-and-pasting all the previous reports that you submitted, making sure you include the E/R diagram, the details about any normalization, your relational schema and, the queries you created (above) in the previous steps of the project. Include the role of each team member in the project. Clearly identify the scope of everybody's contribution. If there were any problems during the course of the project (due to less than complete participation by some team member), please identify them. Mention your project web-page in the first page of your report. Include your answer to the next question too. Of the 20 points, five are reserved for neatness, presentation, style, consistency etc.


4. (40 points) Implement some extra functionality (extra compared to the style guide). In your project report, clearly list exactly what you have implemented and how we can test it. Note that you must implement some extra functionality to have a chance of getting upto 40 points. Here are some suggestions for this step:
   • Implement more complicated DB functionality: inserts, updates, deletes, etc., or some more complex queries.
   • Create a more visual or sophisticated interface for your web application, not just the vanilla style template shown above. If there is a more "natural" way for your application, maybe you will write some nice interface for it.
   • Address other aspects of your application, such as transactions.
   • Implementing user profiles and accounts
   • Automatically recommend new collaborators to a user based on what their co-authors publish.


5. (15 points, Extra credit) If the extra functionality is exceptional, you can get upto 15 points of extra credit, depending on how complex your application is. For example, one thing you can do is if you find a way to integrate and use Amazon AWS services for this project.