Weekly Learning Log

Week Six - Post Development Week for "WebVat"

(10th August 1998 - 16th August 1998)

Department attached to : Knowledge Labs

Weekly Summary of Task / Assignment

Being the sixth week of our Industrial Attachment, we were suppose have started on the development of our main project known as Autonomous Bibliography Building Agent. However due to the difficulities faced in the development of our mini project(Web URLs Validator), it had to be delayed till the seventh week. As for the whole week, I managed to come up with the necessary critierias required for the project by Wednesday which was my estimated target time stated in the previous week's log. I spent my time refining this project during the next two days.

The details of my mini project are as follows :

At this stage, my mini project is fully workable with minimum bugs and error. The "WebVat" as I called it can retrieve a desired website by entering it into a file. To retrieve the source code, one has to click the fetch button after clicking on the display button. If the source code exist (with the start tag <head>), it will appear in the box. But if the source code does not exist, the program will prompt a message box stating that the website is unavailable. To validate the websites retrieving the URLs within the site, a search is made by fetching all links and then veifying them by retrieving their source codes. Once again, the same method is applied as stated before in retrieving the URLs. Problems faced here was that I was not able to find a way to state whether a hyperlink is valid or invalid as different sites have different source code structure. The phrase of words given for the website not existing was also different. With that, I just had to make do with the current state of what I had developed for my mini project.

I will still try my best to improve on the Web Validator along the weeks of my attachment although the major focus would now probably be on the development of Project A.B.B.A. One thing that I realize from this mini project through-out the two weeks given, is that working alone can be a difficult task and to ease the workload, teamwork has to be introduced. The problems faced earlier were also solved with the help from our supervisor.