Big Dog

Blog, Wonderful Blog

My blogging experience has been an enlightening experience and something that could definitely be a beneficial aspect ot any corporation. However, I don't know if blogging will become a mainstream form of social interation such as email or instant messenger. These forms of social interation are more intimate and offer more of a secure medium to share information with others. That's why blogs would be great in the workplace because there is a need to communicate on a non-personal level more than there is on a personal level. I feel blogs could allow companies to transfer valuable knowledge from all over the world to those that need it and can allow others with more experience to offer their opinions on the issues others face. That is exactly what we did in class, we presented problems and others offered their advice to help solve those problems. I know that the blogosphere helped me a lot with some questions I had during the course of this class. I have to say that blogging was fun at times. It was a change of pace that allowed me to get an idea of what others were thinking and what struggles they had that I might be of service. Blogging in BIT 320 was not a real problem for me, but I can see that if I had my own personal blog were I shared my thoughts about anything that I probably wouldn't be using it as much mostly due to laziness more than anything. In the end however blogging was an eyeopener to the types of interaction there can be between a group of people on the Interent and it definately has its advantages. For a person who is by no means computer savvy, I enjoyed my blogging expereience and in the future maybe me and blogs with cross paths again. Who knows?

Project 2 questions

We have two quick questions about the project requirements. The first one is about the comments that are to be included in the stylesheets and XSQL pages. How in depth do you want them to be? We just made little comments where we edited the stylesheets made by the professor with our own information. Is this sufficient or is more explanation needed? Second, we were wondering where the lsttab report is? Is it in a directory or is it a command that we have to run on Oracle to generate our list of views and tables? We were just wondering about these little issues. Any help would be nice.

BIT 320-Final Words

Blogs

Coming into this class I was not familiar at all with blogs or the blogging communities on the Internet. I have definitely made some strides during this semester to fully understand and realize the benefits that blogging can give a person or a company. My blogging experience was very fun and interesting at times and allowed me to share some of my thoughts and problems with a wide array of potential people who could offer their opinions and advice. I feel blogs are a great way to communicate among a lot of people with similar problems and concerns. However, blogging can be intimidating at times because you know that whatever you write is going to be seen by everyone. Overall, I thought my blogging was a new experience that hopefully can be utilized in the future.

Class

This class in general was a great class and I thoroughly enjoyed taking it. I learned so much about databases and web pages and the underlying components of each, which I was a little familiar with at first, but not to a great extent. I really enjoyed working on the projects and to see the transformation from the beginning idea to a workable web page was really amazing. It was a lot of work, especially for someone like me with little computer knowledge and training, to keep up with the processes but eventually it started to sink in. I really enjoyed the fact that we got to actually use the information we learned in class and the material we covered in lad instead of other classes where you just learn the information and don't apply it to real-world situations. That aspect of this class I think makes it a very useful and entertaining class. In conclusion, BIT 320 was a fun class that I enjoyed a lot and I would recommend this class to anyone interested in information technology.

Project 2

I think the second have of our project is coming along nicely. We have yet to tackle the dynamic aspects of the projects which will most likely be the most diffiuclt part of the project but we have a good handle on our views and the forms we want to use. I was just wondering if when you implement your views into HTML is there a way to put a title above the table. For example one of our views from our project selects certain Diet Restrictions of Dance Marathon dancers. I was wondering if you could make a title to indicate that because the column titles in the table aren't very describtive. Just something that I was wondering about while working on project two.

Success at Last

Link: maulin: Stage 2 on Project 2 COMPLETE!!!!.

It took awhile, but I finally managed to figure out how to covert the XML documents that contained the views we created for our project into HTML format on the web. Now all our views are on the web. It was a little tricky at first and I sort of stumpled across the correct way to do it while looking back at the slides from the previous classes. After that it was pretty easy to convert the rest. The big key though as Maulin pointed out is having the root.xsl file in the directory that contains your xsql files. I tried to move the root into another file and HTML didn't work. My best advice is to mess around with it for awhile if you have time and look back on the notes from class. Also working through this also helped me better understand the connection between all the types of documents and what needs to be where to make this happen and that sort of thing. Good Luck with your Projects

Project XSQL

I attempted to convert SQL views from our project into XSQL pages. Believe it or not, I was successful on my first five attempts at converting our views. However, I came across some troubles when it came to a few of our queries. I think the source of the problem has to do with making the XSQL page well-formed. In two of our queries we have the not equal to symbol (<>). I remember somewhere hearing or reading that the processes views the < sign as the beginning of a new element or something. There has to be a way to represent <> without using the < sign. If anybody knows the code please blog back. Other than that my XSQL pages worked fine. However, I was a little curious with the id-attribute part of the XSQL page. What is the purpose of the id-attribute function? I had no idea so I left it blank in all the queries I did.   

jrtrana: Lacking Knowledge

Link: jrtrana: Lacking Knowledge.

I agree totally with you on this one. I have never worked with HTML before so when we're talking about it in class it is as foreign to me as the XSQL and XML stuff. I feel that most people in the class have an understanding of HTML probably through BIT 301, but we haven't gotten there in class yet. From what I hear though it isn't hard to learn which is a good thing.
This site helped me

Today's Class

I was reviewing the slides from class today and I got confused when it came to the root.xsl document. I know that all three documents are connected. I guess I get confused in the order (if their is one) and the way the three are connected. The simpletable creates the table structure I know that. The customerHTML it looks like connects them all together. What is the root.xsl function? Is it the HTML part? I guess I'm just a little confused as to how these documents are connected? Any help would be appreciated.

icemountain: To parse or not to parse...

icemountain: To parse or not to parse...

I was also reading the O'Reily document after class and it proved to be really helpful in clarifing a few things about XML, but I have just a few questions #1 What is the difference between a decimal number and a hexadecimal number? It is probably not that important, but I was just curious. Also I'm a little confused about namespaces. We haven't talked about them yet in class, I don't know if they are essencial or not to XML documents. What exactly is their purpose? Anybody got any answers

Foreign Key Error

A funny thing happened while I was working on my project. I accidently created a foregin key realtionship such that the first table contained a foreign key that referenced the second table and the second table contained a foreign key that referenced the first table. This mistake lead to the inability to drop either table because they both depend on each other thus you can't drop one before the other. Is there a way to unspecify a foreign key constraint or is there a way to drop those tables that the mistake was made in? Any ideas are welcome.