Professionalism

In this course you will be expected to behave as though you were professional web developers. There are a number of aspects to this:

• Development Issues
• Output Issues
• Code Quality
• Security
• Efficiency

Development Issues

In the real world, professional development of web programs and databases is done on a development machine. When the developer is done, code is moved to a test environment where it is thoroughly tested. Finally, the code is moved to the production environment. Some consequences of this are:

• serv1 (www) is a production machine, not a development machine. Wedging the www machine will result in severe penalties.
• Wedging the development machine (smeldra) will also result in penalties if you could have been using command line testing instead.
• Some project requirements exist to permit using a separate test environment; ignore them at your peril.
• Because your scripts will be moved around, prefer relative URLs to absolute URLs in links.
• It is your job to understand both the specifications of the project and the use to be made of your script. Come to class prepared to discuss each project as assigned.

Output Issues

• Your output web pages are to be in HTML, including error messages, unless otherwise specified.
• Your output HTML should look professional with appropriate headers and footers. It should not look like a homework assignment.
• The header of each output page must have an appropriate title.
• The footer should be dated, if dynamically generated.
• All error messages should clearly identify both the field in error and the nature of the error.
• Do not generate text before the body tag.
• Formatting of a page must be appropriate for its intended usage.
• HTML source must be formatted for easy debugging. Wrapping lines and use of whitespace is important.

Code Issues

• Less is more!
• Try to construct libraries of reusable code.
• Prefer the use of arrays to repetitive code.
• Prefer the use of subroutines to repeative code.
• Use iterative enhancement.
• Document your code.
• Unit test your code.