Department of Computing ITEC801 Introduction to Distributed Systems Assignment 2, 2018
Due: Friday 26th October, 2018, 6 pm Marks: 100 Value: 20%
This assignment is designed to help you develop skills and strengthen your understanding of data communications. Answer the questions as if they are a professional presentation to a client. Thus justify what you say in terms of what will work well for the client. Your submission should be around 5 to 10 pages, but be succinct. Your assignment will be submitted electronically as below with TurnItIn on the ITEC801 iLearn page.
Submission
Submit on line via Turnitin link on ITEC801 iLearn page.
TurnItIn is a global assignment submission system that checks for copying. Do not copy blocks of text from the web without quoting and referencing. Do not run text through a translator – it is obvious this has been done. Do not use another student’s work. Do not use any writing service, they usually submit previously done assignments, and you get caught. TurnItIn does a good job of catching all these occurrences. You are being unfair to yourself and other students if you copy.
The assignment submission must be in PDF. Do not submit a Microsoft Word document or any other type of document other than a PDF.
Do NOT double space lines.?
Distributed Web-based Version Control System
Version Control Systems (code repositories) may be centralised or distributed. Two of the most prominent distributed VC Systems are Git (by Linus Torvalds) and Mercurial.
We want to design a web-based VCS based on the same ideas as in Git and Mercurial.
Project Schedule
Week 1
The first phase of this assignment is to do some background reading on what Git and Mercurial do. Understand the peer-to-peer distributed design of these systems. Use this knowledge as a requirements document for the system that you will design. This week corresponds to the Enterprise Viewpoint of ODP.
Week 2
Corresponding to the Information, Computational, and Engineering Viewpoints of ODP do some more detailed design. Here identify the objects of the system, which will be resources in the web system. A primary object (resource) will be a project. This will be a container for other resources that make up the project. These could be program files, but also documents, images, and videos.
Identify the actors in the system, who participates, what they do, etc.
What are the interactions between this system of actors and resources.
Week 3
Considering the technology viewpoint, we want to design a web system which applies REST principles. Level 1 – how will project resources be accessed with names. Level 2 – consider the object lifecycle. How can the HTTP verbs be used to achieve all we want? Level 3 – how can hypermedia be used to direct the action?
If you know HTTP protocol syntax, you can use it, but this is not mandatory. A more general discussion, albeit formal, will suffice.?
Assessment
For all questions in this assignment not only content but also presentation will affect your mark. You will lose marks if there are problems with the presentation, particularly with clarity. This means that your answers to each question should be a coherent statement and that the spelling and grammar of your submission will be taken into account in assessing its presentation.
For full marks, your answers should all be correct, clear, and coherent.
The standards of marking described in the unit outline L.O. 1 will be applied to this assignment as relevant to the assignment topics.
In addition, the following particular standards will be applied in marking this assignment:
Correctness of approach
Incorrect answers with the correct logic or approach will receive no more than a pass for the individual question.
Correct answers within correct logic or approach will receive no more than pass for the individual question.
Incorrect answers with no explanation of the approach taken or with the incorrect approach will receive a fail grade for the individual question.
The questions will be marked individually, the marks totalled, and a final grade assigned that is no more than indicated by the total marks, and no more than allowed by the standards specified above and in the unit outline. Clarity
Multi-paragraph answers should be structured into sections and subsections with appropriate headings and subheadings.
Ambiguous or poorly worded answers will receive a grade no more than a pass for the individual question.
Minor issues of clarity will receive a grade no more than credit for the individual question.
Spelling and grammar
Assignment submissions with more than 4 spelling or grammatical errors will not achieve a grade higher than distinction; submissions with more than 8 such errors will not achieve a grade higher than credit.
The questions will be marked individually, the marks totalled, and a final grade assigned that is no more than indicated by the total marks, and no more than allowed by the standards specified above and in the unit outline.
Submission
Submit on the iLearn page under ‘Assignments Section’. The submission is with a tool called TurnItIn. This cross checks for online papers and other student papers for any plagiarism (copying). In short – DON’T COPY – or get others to do your assignment, we are pretty good at catching people out and the consequences can be severe.
Originality
All material must be in your own work and expressed in your own words.
Plagiarism
You should be well aware of the University's plagiarism policy. In this assignment, you must be particularly careful to avoid plagiarising your articles or any other sources of information. If you wish to directly quote any portion of another document, you must enclose your quotation in quotation marks and immediately following the quotation you must identify your source. It is important that you do not attempt to write your answers by pasting together pieces of text that you find on the Internet. You need to write your own words and phrases that express your own ideas. You must also list all sources used in your answer/essay in a bibliography at the end of the answer/essay. Do not trust anyone who will take money to do assignments. They can take money from several students, return the same assignment, and you get caught. They don’t care about you, but we do!
Please do not include text of questions – TurnItIn reports this as copied text.