Software-Praktikum: FIFI

State: finished
Timeframe: February 2004 to July 2004
Project type: "Studienprojekt" (part of the studies of software engineering)
Client: University of Stuttgart
Role: Architect, Developer
Coworkers: Georg Speidel,
Andreas Schilling
Platform:JEE Application Server
Languages:Java
Libraries:JEE
Technologies:Databases/SQL

Description

The new building of the institute for computer science and software engineering is somewhat complex and visitors do always have some problems to find their destination. There were already two TFT touchscreens installed, but they were not used. A project was initiiated to use these for helping the visitors.

The following functionalities formed the basic requirements:

There should be different views for the event display:

Additionally, a configuration tool should allow the user to enter and to modify single events without having much knowledge of the system.

This project was a task for the 'Softwarepraktikum' – a practical training that is part of the software engineering studies at the University of Stuttgart. In the end, the tutors chose one system to go live.
The quality of the development should be assured by creating a project plan, a specification, a design and a test plan. The documents were checked at scheduled milestones or were internally reviewed.
Furthermore, it was a requirement to implement the system in Java for a Servlet Container. The system should consist of web pages that are to be shown in fullscreen-mode in a web browser. The data was retrieved from a relational database via a persistency library.

Our team chose a very powerful design that would have allowed for many more future extensions. As far as I know, we were the only team that used Servlets (central control) as well as Java Server Pages (for displaying the static regions of the pages) and Custom Tags (for displaying the dynamic areas).
Unfortunately, we did not manage to prevail against all of our excellent competitors.