Hello everyone,

This week, i did not started to work on the app yet. Instead, i spent time on learning HTML 5, CSS, and javascript. I have never learned those concepts before and had no idea about how they will be used to program the WAM app. Hopefully, the next week will be the week full of ideas to start off woking on the app.

From the blog daunguyen10's Blog » CS-WSU by daunguyen10 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Hello everyone,

My name is Dau Nguyen,  a foreign student from Vietnam. Currently, I am a full time student at Worcester State and i am in Junior year of computer science. I’m also taking a minor in math. Taking this course as a requirement of CS major and i’m really excited about it. Since the beginning of my major, i have found that this course is going to bring to me the real experience of a real working environment. It’s also going to help me build up my team work skills.

Through this semester, i and my teammates will work together to develop an application for Worcester Art Museum. This is my first time programing an app that can be used in a real event. And i see that i am going to spend a lot of time on this course because there are many concepts, which i currently don’t know yet, will be used to complete the app…

Anyway, a excited semester ahead, and i’m looking forward working with my teammates to complete the app. Hopefully, we will have a successful semester on this course.

From the blog daunguyen10's Blog » CS-WSU by daunguyen10 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Last Monday  we held class at the Worcester Art Museum so we could meet with the clients and have the project explained to us. It’s pretty cool to know that we’re working on an experimental exhibit that makes use of technology, with us developing the software they intend to use. The history behind the pieces they want to display is pretty interesting do, not only covering the historical significance of the pieces, but also how the museum had acquired them and forgotten about them until relatively recently and begun working with them.

Unfortunately I haven’t made much progress in learning HTML5 and JavaScript. I’m already pretty much an expert on CSS and pretty good with standard HTML4 and XHTML, so I don’t think HTML5 will be too much of a leap, but I really need to sit down and focus and learn JavaScript. I don’t really have too much to blog about this week, but hopefully I’ll have a good amount for next week.

From the blog Five mvs of Doom by Chad Wade Day, Jr. and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This past week, we had our first meeting as a class. This meeting took place at the Worcester Art Museum, where we met the members of the staff that we will be working with on this project. Before discussing the project, Professor Wurst went briefly skimmed over the syllabus and the course requirements. After this, Katrina Stacy and Tim Furman told us about the project and some general guidelines for what they expected. For the most part, they were providing an outline to build upon. They were very open to new suggestions, and this allowed for new ideas to be juggled around for a while. These ideas might be implemented at a later date, but for now it is just speculation.

After this, we went to the conservation lab of the museum. This is where works of art are treated and cared for when they are not on display. This is where they are restored. Here, we were informed of what exactly happens in the conservation lab, and then we were directed over to the three statues (our main focus of the project). We were given a history of the statues themselves, and how they were acquired by the Worcester Art Museum. This allows us to know a little bit more about what we are working with for this project.

As I expected (and can already tell), this class is going to be much different than anything I have done before. It is going to take a bit of time to adjust to the changes, but I am ready to take that challenge.

From the blog bchaban » cs-wsu by bchaban and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week, I met my fellow classmates at the Worcester Art Museum (WAM) to meet our new “client.”  It is the start of our semester long project that will give us the hands on experience to properly develop and deploy a real production application that will be used outside of schooling.  I can safely say that this semester is going to be a very big deal, and it feels like it will be the most important class I’ve taken at WSU.  Software Development Process with Professor Karl Wurst – It is a very exciting time.   

We met with Katrina Stacy and Tim Furman, who were very friendly and welcoming to the group. They would be our main contacts at the WAM, and consequently our clients for this project.  We got a chance to talk about their needs, and we got a feel for what they were looking for.  I was hoping for more clear cut definitions of what they were looking for, but the entire project was very open to different ideas.  That was OK – Since many of us are not familiar with HTML5, it is probably best to have as much flexibility as possible with the project, depending on what we can or cannot develop in our time constraints.  Overall, it was a great start, and I could feel the excitement building. 

I’m actually more excited to try out our new collaboration tools than I am about the actual development process.  Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love the idea of getting hands-on experience with HTML5 and mobile apps, but proper project management skills go a long way, and will be more valuable in the long run after each passing technology.  Even so, this actually all feels very familiar to me – starting with an idea, meeting with the client, brainstorming, planning, etc.  I’ve gone through this process many times before with my various development projects at work.  Management requests a need, a meeting is held to propose a solution, numerous meetings follow to approve changes, and a final release is done.  This time, however, I won’t be taking the process for granted.  We will truly utilize proper project management and collaboration tools online, and we will be working together with over 15 team members, a far larger development group than I am used to.  The overall process is the same, but in a very different environment, and at a much larger scale.  

This project will take a lot of time and effort.  We’ll be learning something new in many different respects: working with a client, working with a large development team, learning new technologies in HTML5, learning to work with mobile devices, and maybe even learning a little art history.  I just hope that I’ll be able to devote the amount of time to the project as I would like.  A new house, a new family, and a new position at work have really made the schedule tight.  I’ll just have to make time because the opportunity to help develop something like this could be over before I know it.  

From the blog mikesaguirre » cs-wsu by mikeaguirre and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Hello,

It’s been a fun week playing around with HTML/CSS this week, so far very little JavaScript.

Installing the tools in Eclipse was no problem, but making a simple project containing HTML5 and some javaScript work proved to be tricky, at least for me as a mac user. It turns out that in Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers (Juno 4.2), trying to run a project that is making use of the: “HTTP preview at LocalHost”, encounters the following problem: “Could not find JRE executable”.

This does not occur and the same project runs fine in Eclipse IDE for JavaScript Web Developers (Helios), after patching bug 293398 which can be downloaded from: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/.

Anyway, hopefully none of you encountered  this problem, and if you did, we’ll work around it this week. 

From the blog betoluna » CS WSU by betoluna1 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Hello again,

This week was moderately exciting, I have made some major head way on the road to developing apps via Phone Gap as well as website design.  I’ve come to the conclusion that I must find the time to start my own webpage.  I have a few side projects for android that are all still in the making admittedly, but the trend seems to be that if you want to publish apps you need a website.  So, it has been a pleasure to learn HTML5 and CSS this past week, even if it was a lot of time spent hammering away at simple syntax.

As luck would have it, I found a great website via mozilla’s website design page called code academy; which had a great web fundamentals learning track.   It was not only exciting to learn the new material but code academy makes it rewarding as well with a series of badges you can earn across several learning tracks.  I have just begun to work through javascript which seems to be going very smoothly due to its vast similarities to java languages.  Its almost frustrating that code academy’s site forces you to work through so many  examples but I suppose practice makes progress and helps to memorize the syntax.

I am hoping to complete the javascript track mid week a begin working on the actual project as soon as tomorrow.  We are expecting to get the display information for our html based app soon,  so our class should have some page layouts ideas to discuss and decide on.  I imagine after doing code academy‘s web fundamentals track that the informative pages of this app will be the smaller challenge of the year.  With any luck we will push through simple informative pages quickly and begin designing more interactive features like games and possibly a reusable framework that can easily update new content without extensive programming knowledge.

Til next time.

Jason

From the blog jasonhintlian » cs-wsu by jasonhintlian and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

In class this past week we used our time to visit the Worcester Art Museum and learn more about the project we will be undertaking. We first went over the class requirements and expectations with Professor Wurst, a necessary step in the first class of the semester. We then heard from Katrina Stacy and Tim Furman with more details about the general outline of the project that will be developed. They both seemed like they had a good understanding of what they want to see in a final product, but were also open to new ideas from us, which is a good thing. The rest of the time with them was sort of a mutual brainstorming session, with a couple new ideas being thrown out there; such as the possibility of the project being developed as a web application.

We then ventured upstairs to the conservation lab where work is done to conserve works of art, such as paintings and sculptures, that are hundreds of years old. The director of the lab spoke to us and first gave us a general idea of what they do and what their purpose is. She then showed us the three sculptures that will be the main focus of the project and gave us an interesting history of how they were made, found, and acquired.

Outside of class time, we were told to look over materials concerning HTML 5, Javascript, and CSS languages to prep ourselves for the coding aspect of the project. The background we have as upper level computer science students has given us a solid base to work up from with these languages that aren’t necessarily taught to us in our academic journey. I also found dzone.com an interesting source for news in the development world and also found that it had great reference resources with the refcardz.

I’m looking forward to class tomorrow to see what ideas my classmates have come up with over the rest of last week.

From the blog ksabanty » cs-wsu by ksabanty and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week we had our first meeting.  It took place at the Worcester Art Museum.  This meeting we talked on how the semester would progress, met some of the staff at the Museum, and got a look at the art pieces that would be the center of our work project.

First on the class side of things learned that the main focus of the class was using what we have learned in the degree to complete a work project as close to real world situation as possible.  So less focus on learning new comp sci skills, more about the practical use of the skills we have.  I got the impression our class having an actual client with a real job wasn’t normal for the class so certainly lucked out I think.

For the project itself we met with Katrina Stacy and Tim Furman who will be our contacts at the Museum.  They explained the project, which is to go with their brand new exhibit and the first time they’ve really had any tech in an exhibit.  We will be designing a program to help show case special artwork.  While we have the specific focus for the three statues this exhibit will start with, if there is time we will be trying to make the program to be changeable as the Museum plans to change the featured art in this exhibit every six months or so.

Our next meetings will be focused heavily on how we want to accomplish this task.  It is a class so all ideas are pulled together from the students and also ideas and requests that the client has.  Almost certainly the class will break into smaller groups to work on different parts of the project simultaneously.  There will be a number of different needed jobs besides just coding, as I have no prior experience with the languages we are using I will likely look to help with the more easy but repetitive coding if needed and other non-coding tasks.  Although all the coding will be available to everyone so I plan to carefully watch everything that is done to help learn more about HTML5 and javascript.  The main reason to avoid doing advanced coding myself being that it would take me a lot longer to get quality code at least at first then one of my classmates who has more experience and I would not want to hold up any part of the project.

I am excited to be a part of this process, a work group, client, and project.  It will be excellent experience and also be something that will look good on a resume.  The professor will be working more as a project lead then a teacher.  Helping if we hit any road blocks, but the learning of how to do things will be primarily up to the students or programmers, just like it would be in a real work environment.

Next week I should have at least the start of the project outline.  Depending on how many ideas come up and how much discussion is needed it is hard to guess just how much we will get done, but as we are on a deadline I know everyone will try to push through as quickly as possible without loosing any quality.

From the blog murrayandrewt » cs-wsu by murrayandrewt and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.