Author: Kevin Sutardji Advisor: Dr. Smith Term: Winter 2013
The Computer Engineering Society (CPEs) holds programming challenges for the general members at the end of each CPEs general meeting. Previously, we have posted the question or problem on a Powerpoint or Google Docs Presentation slide. We then ask the general members to either write their answer on a piece of paper or provide a verbal response. To us, this seems very unprofessional. We proposed to present the CPEs challenge in a more organized way that offers access to more members at the same time. As a result, I believe creating a dedicated webpage for CPEs challenges will be a great opportunity for general members to participate and for the CPEs officers to conduct them easily and, at the same time, I will be able to learn more about web development as well as other technologies that come with it.
The CPEs challenge web page will consists of an administrator page for CPEs officers to administer the challenge, and a user page to provide the question/problem as well as input for the user’s answer. The administrator page will contain controls to open and close the challenge, information on who won the challenge of the day, and information about the answer. The user page will contain a welcome page and the challenge page to input his or her answer.
The web page will be hosted on my own server that I will build and monitor during development. The server operating system distribution will be Debian 6, a Linux distribution known for providing many options for development and uses. The web backend will be written mainly in Django, a web framework written in Python. Since Python is known to allow programmers to code quick programs, Django was written to allow web developers to build a web application quickly and easily. Django is used by Mozilla, Instagram, Pinterest, and other companies, which seems like a very important programming language to be proficient in. The client side user interface will be pragmatically developed using Twitter Bootstrap, a front-end framework provided for developers to create an interactive and modern look for their websites. Twitter Bootstrap contains a 12-column responsive grid, dozens of components, JavaScript plugins, typography, form controls, and more.
I currently have no experience in setting up a web server, developing a website in Django, and creating the front-end with Twitter Bootstrap. This project will mainly open up a variety of opportunities for me to other web frameworks that can be useful in the future. This web project will also be the initial step to make the CPEs website more modern and visually appealing for people to visit.