Hey guys, just came on tonight to check what my assigned project is for next year (not looking forward to it, i can write dissertations but i cant really develop all that well - although Im getting better)
anyway, the aim of the project is to create an application that displays the IP addresses of people who have connected to a particular website within a given timeframe, which can be sorted by different parameters unknown at this moment in time
if the client connects over a network then maybe their username/login could be displayed?
also, the application should show what website they came from (if linked) and what materials they downloaded from the site (if any)
i just wondered what the best way around this is
i am able to program in Java, and Visual Basic (but that would be inappropriate here) as well has having more than basic knowledge in HTML2.0 (no XML unfortunately)
any help is appreciated, just to point me in the general direction
If your familiar with java, you could go with applets/servlets, or JSP.
Id do it in ASP or PHP if its just one website. Quicker to develop that way and inbuilt easy database connections. JDBC can be a whore.
Sounds a bit easy and a bit broad of scope to be a final year project. Make sure you really do think about the different metrics that can be gathered on a persons visit.
Get it sorted well before september when you join back and youll have a solid platform to start from.
Theres also ruby, AJAX/Javascript, ASP.net (which is just vb.net :D so could be appropriate), heck if your familiar with VB you could go the activex control route. Have a browser track a users entire habits and upload them to anywhere... use it for marketing, or just producing a link map, or seeing tendencies.
Tekforums users -> Visit tech related websites, some blogs, youtube. Never know... you could find interesting trends.
Your project is huge if you think about it.
coding the stuff that fetches the IP addresses and referring websites should be pretty easy. Theres code out for it all over the place. For example - every forum software on the web stores the IP address of its users, etc and theyre open source.
The hard bit of your projects is displaying the data in a meaningful way I think. They could ask you to sort it by region of the world, accesses per hour, etc etc.
The nicest solution would be flash graphs but it depends on your timescales. For access graphs something like the graphs on google finance would get you top grades.
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=CAT
Remember that the majority of the marks are awarded for the written part and based on your initial objective, how you went about it and your conclusions.
It is more important to show a logical discussion/argument than it is to have a working solution.
thanks for the replies, helped me a lot
i completely agree with you nimrod, the dissertation is 40% of the project, the actual development is only 20% (!!)
anyway, going to get in touch with my tutor about this and get some more details so i can begin planning ahead
my worst fear is getting snowed under by this and having no time to study at exam time (always happens to me)
hehehe.
I threw my entire dissertation and development together in the two weeks before the deadline. I managed to blag a 2:1 grade from it too; shame I borked my exams :)
Talking it through with your tutor is the best idea. I believe that adjusting the focus of my final year piece towards the specialist area of my tutor (distributed computing), I managed to increase my marks because the topic interested him.
I cannot prove it but I believe it :)
My Title was "Globalisation of IT Support in an Interconnected World". The dissertation was on the potential use of distributed applications to reduce the business cost of IT support. I developed a functioning prototype network dashboard that utilised DCOM, CORBA and SNMP components to query the status of machines/resources. This information was then relayed via XML/HTTP to the client browser.
It was basically a dissertation full of buzz words and (at the time) bleeding edge tech all targeted into his field of expertise :)
lol im the same as nimrod :) Coupled mine together in the last 72 hours before the deadline. Got a 2.2 out of it though, so I dont mind admitting that I could have done better had I been more organised and sorted.
You can write a dissie in the 3 days proceeding a deadline, but I wouldnt advise it. I left things out that I had done (user manual, some mind maps...) and lost marks because of that. Heck just having a user manual would have pushed me up to the 2.1 boundry.
I targetted mine towards the interests of my tutor also. He was interested in distributed/grid computing. My title: "Music Genre Suggestion System" not exactly inspiring, but it concerned the collection of metadata from users of music players on different platforms, in order to store, analyse and report on trends, preferences, and ideally produce an automated "recommendation" system. Noticed that in the grid computing world my university had just got a grant for a project that dealt with the analysis of musical pieces that would produce things that I could use in my project. Wrote a good 5 pages on how it should be possible to utilise that system as part of mine. Think it won him over, especially as he had something to do with said project but it had only just been mentioned in the news of the uni. :D
Quote from: NimrodRemember that the majority of the marks are awarded for the written part and based on your initial objective, how you went about it and your conclusions.
It is more important to show a logical discussion/argument than it is to have a working solution.
But if you get a good working solution youll get a job. If you do a sh*t final project then youll spend the next 5 years explaining why.
All of your undergraduate university comes down to the final grade and what you did for your final project. Its worth getting something semi useful working imo. When they come to work out your final grade your average is tuned based on your major projects. A good dissertation will pull your grades up and a bad one will pull them down on a short 3 year undergrad course.
I went totally the other way - I produced huge projects that worked very well and didnt bother with lectures in my final year. The high marks on the projects pulled high scores throughout, gave a few awards and are still the topics that come up in interviews every day. Noones ever sat me down and asked what modules I did at uni in more than a passing way. Asking me to go into detail about my final year projects, etc happens every single time.
For a bachelors degree you are required to do absolutely nothing new. Your marks are awarded for working out what is out there and how to apply it to your problem. Bachelors is a collating information and applying it exercise - nothing more. So Id pull IP stuff from a forum, Id pull data storage from a database system and do the final representation using a flash graphing system. Make the three work together (not much code required for that and you can use any language to make the different modules speak to each other) and there you have your 80%+ first class result.
You dont even have to do proper referencing or lit reviews if you can demo a system. They wont bother to penalise you for the writeup if it works.
^WOW
thanks for that reply, its weird cos i wasnt even that sure how to go about it bar getting pre-written codes off the net but you guys have really made it straight forward
thanks a lot