CSE 222 Lab #2

Objectives

Familiarity with designing and coding a realistic component-based application program without being provided a skeleton solution.

The Problem

Your customer, Cy Burnett, heads a major publisher of textbooks who is migrating toward on-line access. Cy wants a relatively easy-to-maintain glossary facility. (A glossary is a list of difficult or specialized words, or terms, with their definitions, that is usually near the end of a book.) His initial requirements are as follows:

The output shall be either a single HTML file or a group of HTML files. There shall be a top-level index which merely lists each term in the glossary, and a separate listing of the terms with their definitions. Clicking on a term in the index shall take you to that term and its associated definition. Moreover, clicking on any term in the glossary that happens to appear in a definition shall take you to that term and its associated definition.
Every term shall consist of a single "word" (i.e., a term contains no whitespace characters).
The terms shall appear in the glossary index in alphabetical order. The definitions of terms, if they are included in a single HTML file, shall be listed in alphabetical order by term. In the list of definitions, each term shall appear in red boldface italics just before its definition.
The entire glossary shall be generated in batch fashion by your program, from input on stdin. This input shall consist of a single term on the first line, its definition on the next one or more lines (terminated by an empty line), another term on the next line, its definition on the next one or more lines (terminated by an empty line), etc. The input shall continue in this fashion through the definition of the last term, which shall end with its terminating empty line. The program shall not check for invalid input; the customer shall be responsible for providing input that meets the stated conditions.

These are the stated requirements for your program. If you have questions of clarification or need additional details, Cy is willing to answer them if you ask your instructor to contact him.

Method

Here's what to do:

There are no skeleton files; this is the "blank sheet of paper" lab that you've all been waiting for!
When you are satisfied that your program works, get into your Lab02 directory in an xterm window and use the submit command to submit your solution as follows (noting that you will need to use the appropriate suffix in place of ?? in this command, as posted next to your instructor's name on the CSE 222 Home Page):
```
submit c222?? lab2 *
```
If you get an error message rather than a confirmation of success, please read the message; it contains useful information! Do not just run the same command again. Save the e-mail you get as a receipt of submission, just in case.

Your grade will depend not merely on whether the final program meets the customer's initial requirements, of course, but also on the general software quality factors we've been discussing for the past half-year: understandability, precision, appropriate use of existing software components, maintainability, adherence to coding standards, and so forth.

A sample input file is available at:

/class/sce/now/222/labs/lab02/Lab02/terms.txt

A sample of program output for a glossary done as a single HTML file is available at:

/class/sce/now/222/labs/lab02/Lab02/version1/index.html

A sample of program output for a glossary done as several HTML files is available at:

/class/sce/now/222/labs/lab02/Lab02/version2/index.html

You should not assume that your glossary must look like one of these, which are merely samples of what the output might be. The samples are just something your requirements analyst and the customer cobbled together by hand for a small glossary, to serve as possible prototypes for the final program output. You should feel free to improve on them.

Possible Maintenance Activities

Here are some questions about possible maintenance activities involving this program:

What happens if a definition provided in the input includes HTML tags?
What happens if a term occurs, within a definition, in its plural form? Fix the program so it handles such a case "correctly", i.e., so it introduces a link from that term.
Modify the program to handle multiple-word terms.
Modify the input format and the program so there can be multiple indexes. In particular, allow each term to have not only a definition but a set of other indexes in which it should appear, in addition to the alphabetical master index.
Write a more professional instruction manual (e.g., as an HTML document or using a word processor).

Any extra work is strictly optional, for your own benefit, and will not directly affect your grade.