System Requirement Of Web And Database Server Computer Science Essay

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Minimum hardware requirement:

Intel Core i7 3.4GHz or equivalent

2GB RAM

50GB hard disk storage

10 Mbps Network connection

Minimum software requirement:

Microsoft Window 7

Apache HTTP Server 2.2

Microsoft SQL server 2008

PHP 5.3

System Requirement of Mobile Application

Minimum hardware requirement:

iPhone 3GS or later

iPad 2 or later

3MB disk storage

10 Mbps Network connection

Minimum software requirement:

iOS 5.0 or above

Selection of Programming Language

As we mentioned before, a hybrid mobile application will be developed in this project. Therefore, HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3 will be used to set up the main function and layout of web pages. It saves lots of time on learning Objective-C, the programming language for iOS mobile application development. Furthermore, jQuery, Ajax, JSON, and PHP script are used to handle some of the special mobile application features, layout settings and as well as data interchange with server side.

HTML5, JavaScript & CSS

HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3 are the basic language for web pages building. HTML5 is the latest standard for HTML. It is device independent, works on cross-platform. JavaScript is an open source, client-side scripting language. It is commonly implemented to dynamic websites and provides user interfaces enhancement.

Besides, CSS, which stands for Cascading Style Sheets, is a style sheet language. It describes the presentation outlook and formatting of a HTML document. It can be inline or embedded to the document. Style separation can improve content accessibility, provides more flexibility on presentation characteristics controlling, enables multiple pages to share formatting, and reduce complexity and present as a more structural content.

Furthermore, there are a number of new features which are established based on previous generation of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and DOM. The latest technologies can reduce the need for external plugins like Flash. They have a better error handling method.

jQuery

jQuery is a multi-browser JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML. It is the most popular in used JavaScript library of most visited websites today. It is free, open source software, and licensed under the MIT License.

jQuery's syntax is designed to make it easier to select DOM elements, create animations, navigate from page to page, handle events, and develop Ajax applications. Also, it enables developers to create plug-ins on top of the JavaScript library. This provides capabilities for developers to create low-level interaction and animation, advanced effects and high-level, themed widgets. The modular approach to the jQuery library allows the creation of powerful dynamic web pages and web applications.

jQuery includes the following features:

DOM element selections using the multi-browsers open source selector engine Sizzle

DOM modification supports for CSS 1 - 3

DOM manipulation based on CSS selectors (element id and class) as criteria to build selectors

Events

Effects and animations

AJAX

Extensibility through plug-ins

Utilities - such as user agent information, feature detection

Compatibility methods that are natively available in modern browsers

Multi-browser support.

Ajax

Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It is a group of inter-related web development techniques used on the client-side to create asynchronous and interactive web applications. Moreover, it can increase the web page responsiveness and interactivity. With Ajax, web applications can send and retrieve data in the background. This functions properly without interfering with the display and behavior of the current page. Data can be retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object. This allows small amount of data exchange between application and server only. JSON is used to get the packed and readable value.

Ajax is not a single technology, but a group of technologies that works with the combination of HTML and CSS. They can be used to mark up and style information. The DOM is accessed with JavaScript to control display dynamically. And users are allowed to interact with the information presented. JavaScript and the XMLHttpRequest object provide a method for exchanging data asynchronously between browser and server to avoid full page reloads.

JSON

JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. It is a text-based open standard made for human-readable data exchange. It is derived from the JavaScript for representing simple data structures and associative arrays. We called them objects. Despite the relationship between JSON and JavaScript, it is language-independent. They can be parsed into different forms and many languages.

PHP

PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a widely used and open source server-side scripting language designed for Web development. It is good for producing dynamic Web pages. It scripts are executed on the server which is free to download and use. And it runs on different platforms such as Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X. In addition, PHP is convenient to use. It can contain text, HTML, JavaScript, and PHP. PHP is executed on the server, and the result is returned to the browser as plain HTML. PHP has lots of advantages too.

PHP possesses the following advantages:

can generate dynamic page content

can create, open, read, write, and delete files on the server

can collect form data

can send and receive cookies

can add, delete, modify data in your database

can restrict users to access some pages on your website

can encrypt data

Selection of Database Server

Microsoft SQL server is one of the most popular software of Microsoft products and also the most widely used database server in commercial or industry. Microsoft SQL server provides scalability, security, reliability, and performance. MSSQL is used as we are quite familiar with this software. It is because we learnt that in the placement year. MSSQL has an embedded tool, SQL Profile for testing. It is very convenient to validate the objects value and parameter passing process.

Another reason that MSSQL is chosen because it provides a user-friendly interface. Table creation, updating, and deletion can be done by simple scripts execution. Neat and structural table viewing is provided.

Selection of Web Server

Two popular web servers, Internet Information Services (IIS) and Apache HTTP Server were considered to use as the web server in my system. Finally, Apache HTTP Server is chosen after certain comparisons between these two servers.

Although IIS and MSSQL server both are developed by Microsoft, IIS may eliminate the incompatible problems on connection and data transfer. However, it is different to communicate with iOS mobile application. Most applications on market are using Apache HTTP Server where they are running on UNIX or Linux operating system. Most likely, they are operating with PHP, Java, and Perl. Apache fully supports what PHP script that we have been chosen as one of the programming languages.

Selection of Mobile Application Framework

PhoneGap

PhoneGap acts as a framework to create hybrid applications in an easy way. A simple web application is built with web standard HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. This web application can be wrapped and packed into a hybrid application by using PhoneGap. Other than acting as a web application wrapper, this framework provides some APIs which bring in native application features. Native application features can be added to the web applications and publish to the market conveniently. Furthermore, it supports numerous of mobile platform, including the most common platform, iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry OS. However, there is one drawback. It does not supply attractive and fancy outlook. As UI component is inadequate, advance UI presentation tools or framework is needed.

jQuery Mobile

jQuery Mobile is introduced to aid the insufficient UI component. They are a perfect match to be a graphical and functional partner. jQuery provides varies components on assisting dynamic and user-friendly layout design. It is designed for view controlling on smartphones and tablets. It coordinates with HTML5 in order to support touch event that possess on native applications. It provides a uniform appearance of the application. This helps to maintain the consistency. Lastly, it provides compressed external script files which can minimize the code repetition. It preserves a lightweight coding style.

Implementation Difficulties

Although simple and basic HTML skills are taught in year 1 and 2, we are not handling them proficiently. HTML5 has some new features. New document element tags are designed and some of the tags are changed too. We are not familiar with that. Moreover, totally different error handling methods are introduced. There is not much reference books teaching HTML5 because it is a recent developed languages. It was a difficult task for us to learn such a new languages.

Besides, brainstorming new idea and making structural architecture are difficult for an individual. Selection of programming language and web server is hard. Building a web server is totally new to me. We have learnt simple SQL command before but not implementing web services. It takes some time to look for tutorial and solution. Finally, PHP and Apache HTTP Server is chosen because they are easier to learn and manage. Data request and retrieval from database need the aid of some scripting languages. jQuery, JSON, and Ajax are used in order to solve the issue. It is completely new to me again. They are complicated and hard to be handle.

On the other hand, layout design is another problems. We are not designers who are not good at graphical drawing. Trying to visualize modern and creative layout to users is not possible in that framework PhoneGap does not have enough UI components. To cope with the dynamic layout and interactive response between application and users, jQuery mobile has to be introduced. As a result, we have to face numerous problems at the early stage of programming planning and development.

Although coding references and examples could be found on some programming books and the Internet, everyone has different coding styles. It is not as simple as you can imagine understanding those suggested solution and reuse the resources. We spent lots of time studying these new technologies and programming languages.

Other than difficulties on development, time is the most critical challenges. After finishing a small function of project, the rest of the time is spent on testing and debugging. It is terribly time consuming since bug appearance varies from time to time and extremely slow processing time on emulator. In addition, testing on different devices such as iPhone and iPad is required. As design and developing time is limited, it is very challenging to build a smooth, workable mobile application alone. Tasks scheduling and resources allocation are necessary. However, this is a single person project. Discussion and tasks allocation among teammates is a dream only. The knowledge of one man is narrow. Therefore, limited manpower and arduous debugging slow down the progress of the whole project.