Functional Spec Submitted

[Week 8]

After some tweaks to my inital draft suggested by Dr. MR and MOC my functional specification is finally complete and I submitted it today. It may be downloaded here.

Project Proposal Approved!

[Week 1]

Finally a decision was made. I deviated away from the ideas mentioned in my previous post to dive into the XML world.

The project's title is XPath to SQL Converter and its aim is to provide the following features:

• Ability to read XML Schema (.xsd) files
  
• Build a tree based on schema file selected
  
• Allow user to select nodes from the tree to build an XPath expression
  
• Allow user to add a predicate to certain nodes where appropriate
  
• Build XPath expression based on user selection
  
• Convert XPath expression to SQL and query PostgresSQL DB
  
• Display results in user friendly manner
  

The main motivation for this project lies in the fact that querying over native XML databases can be inefficient. It has been shown that building relational indexes of XML data and querying with SQL can be more efficient.

I think it will also be cool to explore various interface possibilities for displaying schemas and selecting nodes to dynamically build XPath queries.

Final Year Project Ideas

Welcome to the first post of my new software engineering blog!

For the next 7 months I'll be blogging about my final year project.

Our project proposals are due October 28th - only 2 weeks away!

Current possibles (suggestions by lecturers):

1. A web application that would allow a group of people to create a family tree.  [cdaly]
2. An application which would add module class times to google calendars. [dgray]