A Database And…
2009-12-11 – 06:43As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m teaching the second course in our two-course sequence on software engineering next term (i.e., in three and a half weeks). The goal of the course is to teach students how to deal with large pre-existing code bases; my first thought was to have each team go spelunking in a different open source project, but (a) I haven’t been able to find enough that meet my criteria, and (b) marking would be very difficult. I’m therefore looking at:
- Building a connector so that Gnumeric or OpenOffice Calc can be used as a front-end to SQLite.
- Help out with SpatiaLite, a set of geospatial extensions to SQLite.
- Help out with PyLint, a static analysis tool for Python.
- Refactor the Selenium IDE to make it more pluginnable.
I was hoping to find something that would tie in to this term’s Open Government projects with the City of Toronto (it seems a shame to lose the momentum), but I haven’t found anything yet that doesn’t require more web programming background than it’s fair to assume—roughly 1/3 of the students in the course haven’t done CSC309 (our web programming course), and while many are taking it concurrently with CSC302, it wouldn’t make for a level playing field.
5 Responses to “A Database And…”
Hey, Greg, I’ll be taking 302 next semester, and I was wondering - if each team will be tackling a different open source project, would it be possible to split us up by self-professed skill level?
You could send out a little survey now asking if we’ve done 309/324/369, or ask about the languages and frameworks in which we’ve written a medium-sized assignment’s worth of code, or just send out links to candidate projects and ask which we’d be willing to tackle.
It might wreck any plans you had for us to learn to work in diverse teams, but it would allow you a little more leeway in selecting projects if you assign teams to projects that use tech they’ve indicated they’re comfortable with. You’ve probably already tried this at some point, but I thought it was worth a mention.
By Sarah on Dec 11, 2009
I’ve never used pyspread http://lwn.net/Articles/364745/ but it should be straight forward to pipe SQLite data to pyspread and vice-versa. Also check tablelistwrapper http://tkinter.unpythonic.net/wiki/TableListWrapper
By Curly on Dec 11, 2009
What are your criteria? (Mentioned in point (a) above?)
By Aran on Dec 12, 2009
@Aran See the earlier post (linked at the start of this one) for criteria.
By Greg Wilson on Dec 12, 2009