Spring '25 Week 8

Video Script

Hi, everyone, and welcome to the week eight announcements video for CIS 526 and CC 515 in spring 2025. So as we talked about last week, I’m kind of taking over this course from Dr. Bean, who’s going to be shifting over to cover another course for the rest of the semester. And so as part of that, one of the things I’ve been working on is a lot of new content for this course to introduce how you would actually build a RESTful API and a standalone single page front end application using some of the more industry standard techniques and practices. The early part of this class with Dr. Bean is really great because it shows you behind the scenes, the intricacies of how these things work. You get to build your own cookie parser, your own body parser. You build your own very low level handlers for a lot of these things. And so now we’re going to take a step up the food chain a little bit, and we’re going to rebuild some of these ideas using the standard stuff that Node and Express includes.

So I’ve just published the first three modules of this new content on canvas. So as you get to this point, you’ll want to get started on it. I have this first page right here that just explains what we’re going to do with this tutorial project. The second link right here, this is a GitHub classroom link that will take you to GitHub classroom and it will ask you to accept the assignment on GitHub classroom. Hopefully you’re all familiar with that. At this point, it’s in the same classroom as the previous parts of this class. And then we’re going to work in that same repository for the rest of the semester. And then after that, we’re going to do a tutorial project. These links will take you directly to the textbook for this class. And so in here, I’ve created this new example projects. And what you’re going to do for each example is you’re going to go through all of the pages in this chapter. So this starter project has 11 steps. Each step has a video where I have walked through step by step doing everything, every single thing. But I also try and include lots and lots of screenshots and examples. I show you a lot of code. One of the things you’ll notice at the top of the code is I try and show you the file name of the files that we’re looking at. For terminal, I show you whether it’s terminal or terminal output.

So hopefully it’s pretty easy to follow along as we go through this process. But basically what you’ll do for this tutorial is you’ll go through all of these, you’ll get to the summary step where we’ve got everything done. And then for this first one, all you really have to do to complete that project is get all the way through to the end of the tutorial. And so if I go back here to week eight, all you’re going to do is submit that tutorial just to show that you’ve done it. That is due by the Monday after spring break. Then we’re going to go through and we’re going to add a database. And so for this one, you’re going to add a database following the tutorial. You’ll turn in that tutorial by making a commit and making a release commit there. And then immediately after that, you’re going to go in and additionally add additional database tables and content to the database. So you’re going to turn in the tutorial, make a release commit, submit that, then building right on top of that, you’re going to add your own database files and then submit that again. These are both due on the same day, but really you’re going to do the tutorial first, then you’re going to do the milestone. I just put them together on the same day to keep that same cadence. Likewise, step three. I’ll walk through adding part of the API and then you’re going to add the rest of the API in this milestone here. And then we’ll go on to talk about authentication. We’ll build a Vue.js starter project and build a CRUD app and then build some components on top of that. And I may add one additional module here at the end just to kind of show how you would distribute and actually dockerize this. It probably won’t be actually due for a grade but it will be something I’ll try and add if I get time. So what you’re actually ending up building is you’re building a RESTful API and a single page frontend application for the Lost Communities project that you’ve been working on throughout the semester.

And so this is actually my model solution for milestone three, where you have the full API. I’m currently working on adding these authentication routes so you can just ignore these. During the tutorial, I’m going to show you how to add the users routes. And so all of these users routes, for example, I can try it out, hit execute and I’ll be able to get a list of users in the application. I can also go in here and let’s say I want to create a new user. So I can create a new user and this is gonna be announcement user. So I’m creating a new user with these couple of roles. I hit execute, we’ll see that it worked correctly. And so now if I go up here to my endpoint for all the users and execute it again, we should now see that my new user is in our API. And so what you’re going to do is you’re going to not only create the API endpoints for dealing with users, you’ll also create endpoints for dealing with communities. For getting the list of counties, you don’t have to update the counties. We’ll have one for documents including a endpoint to upload a document. And then we’ll have one for metadata where you can create metadata items and then you can add or remove documents and communities from that metadata item. So all of these should be well within your reach. The other thing that you’re going to do as part of this is you’re going to write an awful lot of unit tests. And so if I do NPM run tests on my project, I should end up with a whole lot of unit tests here. and this may take just a second for it to run, but you’ll notice I have tests for communities, for counties, for documents, for metadata. I’ve got document roles, users, and so my model solution ends up with 203 unit tests. Now, obviously some of these are just repeated unit tests with different variables added, but that gives you kind of an idea of what I’m expecting by the end of milestone three, and then we’ll go on to add authentication and other things on top of that.

So that’s kind of where we’re going. This is a little bit of a shift in content and tone of the course. It’s all brand new content, so if you have any questions or concerns, I encourage you to let me know. I’ve created a bug bounty mega thread in the ed discussion, so you can post bug bounties there. I’ll probably also create mega threads for each of these milestones so that we can have a good discussion there. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, let me know. Otherwise, best of luck as we transition to this new part of this class. We’re really halfway through the semester at this point. I hope you have a safe and relaxing spring break and I will see you again in a couple of weeks.

Spring '25 Week 9

Video Script

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the week nine announcements video for CIS 526 and CC 515 in spring 2025. Not much new to add this week. Hopefully, everybody got started on the RESTful API starter over spring break, which was due yesterday. I see that several people have already submitted this. This project is pretty easy. All you really have to do is accept the GitHub classroom and then build the starter project following exactly through my videos. There’s maybe about an hour and a half to two hours worth of videos of me going through it. But I give you every single piece of code for this first one. This is mainly just a tutorial that you follow along to be able to build the starter project that we’re gonna work on from there. But it includes a lot of really good explanations of why I’m structuring the things the way I am. Gives you some interactive tutorials of how to add documentation and things to your code. So I think this is a really good thing just to see how one person would approach an express starter project.

Then starting this week, we’re gonna add a database to our project. So we go through a tutorial for adding a SQLite database to our project. And then I go through adding a couple of things to the project, namely the users and the roles tables. So you add a couple of migrations, a couple of data seeds. You put everything together so that your project now has data. That milestone is due next Monday. And so that includes a tutorial that you’re gonna submit the tutorial by making a release commit on GitHub. And then immediately after that, you’re going to continue to work in the same GitHub repository to then add the milestone content on top of it. And so when we do grading, we’re gonna check out your repository and we’re gonna look for that tag that you created as part of this tutorial. We’ll grade that and then we will check it out again. We’ll look for the tag that you submitted here for your milestone that will be your tutorial plus your additional milestone content. This basically gives you a chance to get quite a few tutorial points by doing the tutorial, tagging it properly. And then there’s more points available for projects as you add the database. If you’re unsure how to do any of that, most of it’s covered in the videos. If not, let me know or talk to Josh, the GTA, and we’re more than happy to help.

So the milestone for this week is pretty simple. You’re going to take your starter project that you turned in last week. You’re going to add a database to it. In my example, I show you how to add the users and the roles and the user roles table. What you’re going to add is you’re going to add the metadata, documents, communities, and counties table, as well as these many to many join tables for joining metadata and documents and metadata and communities. So this is the database diagram that you will be following. Hopefully it makes sense. Hopefully it’s all in there correct. If you have any suggestions or corrections to this, let me know, but I’m pretty sure this is correct based on what you should have learned in your database course. There’s also some seed data that you’ll add into this program. I give a little hint for seeding data from a CSV file. If you go to the course on Canvas and you look at the files, there is your seed data right here. This is a zip file of the seed data, the CSV files that you will use to seed the data into the database. And it should be pretty straightforward to do that, but if you run it in the errors or have any questions, feel free to let us know.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got that’s new for this week. Hopefully the new content is going well. But as always, if you have any questions or concerns about it, please go to Ed discussion and either post in there or post something under the bug bounty thread if you find any mistakes or corrections for my work. I’m always looking for that, especially because this is a lot of new content this year. But as always, hopefully things are going well. Best of luck, and I will see you again next week.

Spring '25 Week 10

Video Script

Hello and welcome to the week 10 announcements video for CIS 526 and CC 515 in spring 2025. So over spring break, we shifted over to a lot of the new content that I’ve been working on for the semester. And so I see a lot of you have already completed some of the content for weeks 8, 9 and 10, which is great. Hopefully if you’re keeping up in the class, the content for week nine adding a database was due yesterday. So I see quite a few of you have done that. And then the third part, adding an API and unit tests is due this week. This is one of the larger milestones just because of the number of unit tests that you’re going to add to your project. So I really encourage you to try and get the tutorial done as soon as you can so that you’ve got plenty of time to work on the API and unit tests. That’s due next Monday.

The part after that is on authentication. I have all of this written. I just have not had a chance to do the videos. So my goal is to do the videos for this later this week and get this posted. This will be the content that you’ll be working on next week. And then I’m going to start writing the next three tutorials. The first one is just going to be like the earlier tutorial where it’s going to be a simple tutorial to set up your view front end. And then we’ll work on doing a CRUD app, working on components. And if I get a chance by the end of the semester, I’m going to try and also write a short optional tutorial on how to build and deploy this using Docker. So we’re getting toward the end of the semester. I need a little bit more time to get some videos and writing done, but I’m hoping to get that done in the next couple of weeks.

Also going backwards a little bit, I see that there are still several students in this class that have not submitted milestones four or five for the previous content. Please, please make sure you get those turned in as soon as possible. I will be reaching out to those of you that haven’t done that later today. Please make sure you get those in soon. If if we don’t get those in soon, I’m probably going to start assessing late penalties on things just to keep you on track and make sure that you’re getting stuff done. We want to make sure that you get everything taken care of so that by the end of the semester milestones and that you’ll be able to get everything complete. I know Josh is going through and grading the last couple of tutorials on the single page apps and the react chat app. apps, so watch out for those grades.

I will say for things like these starter tutorials, please make sure you test your code before you submit it. If you submit, for example, this Express Starter Project tutorial, and it does not compile and run, you’re going to lose an awful lot of points in that tutorial. You really, really, really need to make sure that you test your own code and understand it and make sure it’s working. I try, especially for these tutorials, I try and give you lots of context for the different code snippets and how they go together, but it’s really up to you to test it and make sure that it works properly. So, especially for these tutorials, make sure you test them before you submit them. For the other parts, the milestones, make sure you go through and understand how they work when you submit them.

Hopefully things go well with this. It’s kind of a new course structure we’re trying. If we run into any errors or if you have any questions, just let us know. So that’s really what we’re doing this week Like I said, I should be able to post these next couple of milestones very shortly once I get the videos recorded If you have any questions, let us know otherwise best of luck and I’ll follow up again in a week or two