Engr 691-10: Special Topics in Engineering Science
Distributed Objects
Spring Semester 2001
Initial Project Ideas


The following topics have been selected for the projects this semester. The descriptions are provided to give a general idea of what the system should do. The first task of your group is to write a requirements document.

  1. Internet Election System

    The purpose is to be able to conduct elections for an organizations such as the Ole Miss Faculty Senate or Associated Student Body via the internet. The system should support login authentication of the voter, display of the appropriate ballot for the voter, collection of the marked ballots, tabulation of the votes, and reporting of the votes. It should be developed with security, reliability, flexibility, and extensibility in mind.

    Dr. Cunningham has more information about this in his Acxiom grant proposal.

  2. Faculty Activity Report Creation and Submission System

    The purpose is for faculty members at Ole Miss to be able to create, edit, and submit their annual Faculty Activity Reports. The faculty member should be able to create the report incrementally over a period of time. Once submitted, the information should be able to be processed by tools that collect information about certain items across all faculty members in some category (e.g., all publications during the year). The system should be developed with appropriate security, reliability, flexibility, and extensibility in mind.

    Dr. Cunningham can supply the description of the report.

  3. Student Advising Form

    The purpose is to create an advising tool for use by computer science faculty members and students. The tool should be able to display online forms similar to the advising checklists now used in the department for its BSCS and BA degree programs. It should support the BSCS, BA, and MS programs. It should be possible to retrieve the information about what the student has taken, edit that information online, and store the new information back. The system should check for satisfaction of requirements and prerequisites. It should be possible to add to the system to generate a document similar to the application for graduation. The system should be developed with appropriate security, reliability, flexibility and extensibility in mind.

  4. Activities Calendar

    The purpose is to provide a tool for creating, updating, and displaying a calendar of activities for an organization (e.g., an academic department consisting of faculty and staff members and students). Individuals may have personal calendars which they can update and display; items on the calendar may have two or more levels of accessibilty (private, public, group, etc.) They also may be members of one or more groups which also have calendars of activities. There is also an organization-wide calendar. The system should be developed with appropriate security, reliability, flexibility and extensibility in mind.

  5. Messaging System

    The purpose is to provide a tool for the exchange of messages within an organization. Whenever a user logs into the messaging system, he or she is notified of all messages that have arrived while off the system and is allowed to access those messages. A user may send messages to other individual users. Users may be associated with various groups. They receive messages for each of the groups to which they are associated. Selectively, users may also be authorized to send messages to a particular group. The system should be developed with appropriate security, reliability, flexibility and extensibility in mind.

  6. Distributed, Multiplayer Game

    The purpose is to enable players to play the game (e.g., chess, chckers, etc.) in a space (and perhaps time distributed) fashion. The system should support the display of the game "boards", players making "moves", determination of scores or winners, etc. It would be helpful if the game can be saved and restored. Multiple games should be supported at once. A mechanism for scheduling games is probably needed. The system should be developed with appropriate security, reliability, flexibility and extensibility in mind.

  7. Internet Auction System

    The purpose is to produce an Internet-based auction application. Users should be able to register on to the system. They may place items for sale by the auction. The system will allow users to bid on items during some fixed interval and determine the buyer at the end of the period. The system should be developed with appropriate security, reliability, flexibility and extensibility in mind.

  8. Rental Car Reservation System

    The purpose is to allow users to reserve cars of particular kinds at particular locations at particular times and return them at particular times at the same or other locations. The car rental agency has a pool consisting of various mixes of cars at particular locations. Given sufficient time, cars may be moved from one location to another to satisfy user needs. Try to include other issues such as periods of unavailability for routine service. This should be done in a way to minimize costs. The system should be developed with security, reliability, flexibility, and extensibility in mind.


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Copyright © 2001, H. Conrad Cunningham
Last modified: Mon Feb 26 15:20:13 CST 2001