Homework 2

Due: March 10, 2005

This homework is intended to give you a chance to improve upon the work you did for project 1. The nature of the work you do is open ended. I am particularly interested in work to make your web server more reliable/robust, but other work is perfectly acceptable.

Some possible things you might do for this assignment include:

∑ Get it to work if the original version did not!

∑ Run a suite of test cases to verify the server is reliable and robust (more than what you did in the original project).

∑ Incorporate more extensive error checking, error reporting, and/or diagnostic reporting (for debugging purposes) in any and all aspects of the operation of your web server.

∑ More comprehensive experiments than what you completed in the original project.

∑ An improved write up / report.

Grading for this assignment is as follows. Your base grade will be the grade you received on the first project. Additional credit will be awarded for additional work you do. So, if you got a decent grade on project 1, you need not do anything at all for this assignment (your reward for doing a good job the first time around)! Be warned, however. The goal of this exercise is to improve the robustness of your software, which will likely make your life easier later in the semester, so better to clean things up now than pay for your mistakes later!

In general, doing a good job on any one of the bullets listed above will be sufficient to receive full credit for this assignment. You need not work on things for which you lost credit in the original project, e.g., if you lost points for not doing much experimentation, it is perfectly fine to spend your effort on this assignment making your software more robust.

You should turn in a short report describing what you did, and turn in any new software you developed (same procedure as the original project). It is up to you to demonstrate you did a ≥reasonable≤ amount of work to get full credit for this assignment, so be sure to document your efforts.