A Web Database Development Course and a Unique Problem-Solving Project

Today, the content of most Web sites contains dynamically generated pages that present information stored in a database, and computer science students are eager to learn how to develop these database-driven Web sites. This paper presents how students at the University of Houston- Clear Lake (UHCL) learn about Web database development in a course that emphasizes project-building activities, and it looks at the implementation details of a successful student project, the Online Address Book. Four unique problems and the solutions that were implemented in this project are explained: 1) editing multiple students ’ data; 2) checking the data with a regular expression; 3) stale session variables; and 4) potential security violations. The Online Address Book At UHCL, students have the opportunity to learn how to develop database-driven Web sites by taking CSCI 5633 Web Database Development. [1] In this course, the emphasis is on developing practical skills, and its most important feature is a semester-long project that produces a fully functional Web site that uses a backend database. This section looks at how a successful student project, the Online Address Book was implemented. The Online Address Book project is a database-driven Web application that displays the names, email addresses, and home page addresses of all of the students in the class. Other requirements are: 1) the user must be able to display the names sorted either by the student’s last name or by their user ID number; 2) each student in the Address Book must be able to edit his or her own name and address information; 3) password authentication is required before a user can edit the data; and 4) the data must be maintainable by a user with an administrator role