Server-Side Processing with HTTP - Part I

Description

In this assignment was to have you will build a simple search engine and WWW front-end for the fictitious company The Great DVD. The idea is to let users search through a database of movie titles prior to reserving a particular movie. Unfortunately, if you followed the instructions to the administrative tasks below, you also copied my version of the answers to this assignment. None the less, you can still salvage some benefit from this assignment by doing the follow, which will be due, on Monday, Feb, 18.

  1. Since many of you in the class are not very familiar with scripts (basically a collection of what otherwise would be "command-line" functions (line-at-a-time interpreted commands) that are assembled into a series of commands executed one after the other once the file containing these instructions is executed. At this point, learning php may be you best option. The Bourne shell is another option, as are Perl and Bash. See references for more help or click the reference icon below.
  2. Edit and test a CGI script named isindexSearch.cgi (details) that you dowloaded. It lets a user enter a search term and display the results of a search. Edit it by at least adding another image of yourself to the page that is displayed. If inspired you may make other changes to the look and feel of this page.
  3. look carefully at the Java application named RentalsSearchServer.java (details) that searches through a database of movie titles for a given word. Write a description of what each element of that code is doing and how it is doing it.
  4. Describe the major shortcomings of using ISINDEX for this kind of application.

You may use any books or notes at your disposal. I strongly encourage you to work on your own; howver, if you need to consult with one of your clasmates, you may do so, but you must be careful. You MUST turn in your own work, not something that contains stuff copied from your classmates. If you have not already done so, make sure that you take care of all of the administrative tasks that need to be completed before you can use the CGI at Princeton.