"Online Time-Table"

Supervised by M.Cooke

Abstract

The idea behind the work was to use e-commerce principles in order to build an online system to manage events created by individuals. The project was named 'Online TimeTable' as it was designed with the needs of university students and academics in mind.

The system was developed using the 'spiral' approach, that is, design, implementation and testing were conducted a series of times until the final solution was achieved.

The technical architecture involved the use of JavaServer Pages together with JavaBeans for the bulk of information transfer and persistence was left up to the chosen database (MySQL). The database was designed so as to greatly minimise the possibility that more than one person could change the same data at the same time, and thus avoid compromising data integrity. The database was complemented by the use of Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) documents embedded as fields within tables of the database. These documents can be modified in future to extend the system without the need to redesign the database.

The system has four levels of access, which limit the functionality of the system for each type of user. Students can view and create events that apply to them, academics can create events that apply to a group of people, and administrators have direct access to the database through an implemented graphical interface. Users can also receive a weekly summary of events by email and be informed instantaneously of changes to their timetable.

In order to polish the product, registration, modification of user details, password retrieval, password change and security question change screens have been implemented.