Course Content
Cloud
The first portion of the class will focus on cloud development. This will cover the differences between a service and a product. Then you will design a cloud based application. In doing so you will learn about and have the opportunity to implement different aspects of cloud software development. This will focus on the way data is stored and the way it is accessed.
APIs
In the past you likely have interacted with an API provided either in software or on the web. In this portion of the class you will learn about API design and you will implement an API yourself that others would be able to use. This will be very tightly coupled with the cloud service you create.
Mobile Development
The third portion of the class will focus on mobile development. In this portion of the class you will learn about the various features that exists on most mobile platforms. You will then write a program that in some way leverages features made available by mobile platforms.
Student Expectations
Prior Knowledge
Students are expected to know the following:
- File IO and Sockets
- You may need to do a fair bit of work with an operating system. You should be comfortable with a IO stream and be able to save and load state from a file. You should also be comfortable communicating between processes using sockets.
- Advanced Object Oriented Design
- You should know when to use a class, when to subclass, what an abstract class is and how to use an abstract class. You will be working in a lot of complex systems that will expect you to be able to use these tools.
- Ability to Learn a new Language
- There are currently no mobile platform or major cloud platforms whos primary language is C++. You will likely need to learn at least 2 new languages in this class. The emphasis of the material will not be on learning those new languages.
- Problem solving
- If a language does not provide you a tool to do something, but you need that tool to make progress, you should be comfortable making it yourself.
- Organization and documentation
- You should be able to look at a project and follow source code to figure out how it functions. You will likely have to deal with some larger software packages to implement some assignments in this class so you should be comfortable learning a large, unfamiliar collection of source code.
- Things not on this list
- This is not a comprehensive list, but it is a good start. If you don't know any of these topics, consider reviewing them before the class begins.
Communication
Read this guide on on-line communication. Follow every link in the section on asking good questions and giving good answers. You may be graded on the quality of your discussion. You need to communicate with clients and coworkers in the real world, you need to communicate with your fellow students here. You learn by finding the limits and holes in your knowledge. The best way for you to find them is to talk with others about the topics at hand.
Communication Methods
- Piazza
- This should be used for all questions seeking technical help, conceptual help or assignment clarification. Essentially if it is any sort of information that may benefit other students, it should be posted to Piazza. If there is a question that gets ignored for longer than 48 weekday hours you can email the instructor and TA and ask them to follow up with it. It may have just gotten missed.
- Email
- Email should be used for anything that contains sensitive information. So if you have a question about a grade or want to request an extension, do so via email. All emails should contain the exact characters
[CS496] in the subject so that they get priority in my inbox. In addition, every time you reply to an email thread it knocks it to the back of the queue because email gets processed in order of the most recent emails last. So be careful sending multiple replies as it might bump you back in the queue.
- Canvas Comments
- Canvas comments should only be used by students to add commentary prior to grading and by myself and the TAs to give feedback. If you need to communicate something to myself or the TAs after your assignment has been graded do so via Email. We will not see comments posted to your assignment submission after it has been graded.
- Canvas Mail
- The TAs and myself try the best we can to monitor Canvas email. But there are less options to sort and filter mail via that system so there is a much higher likely-hood that we will miss things that get sent via Canvas mail. So I suggest you do not use it.
Communication Timelines
All emails should get a response within 48 weekday hours. So if you send an email at 8am on Monday, you should have a response by 8am on Wednesday. If you send an email at 10pm on Thursday, you should have a response by 10pm on Monday.
Do not expect communication on the weekends, though I do my best to look for urgent questions that are preventing you from making progress and answering them, even on the weekend. The more complete the question, the more likely you are to get help.
Code quality
Code must be clear and you must understand what it is doing. Having well commented and documented code is going to be extremely important. I or the TA may not know the platform you are using so it is your responsiblity to make sure that we can follow what is happening.
You should also have no major errors in your program. If we can manage to get the program to throw some default error message that is usually a major issue. Errors which you handle by popping up a message the user would understand (eg. 'Please enter only numbers in the age field') are usually fine, error messages like 'Error 0x00001: Null pointer to Null found, expected pointer to Int Factory Factory' are not.
When possible, you should find a style guide and conform to it.