Lab 2: Guest book server

In this lab, you will create a guest book , where people visiting your home page can register themselves as guests. Your guests will be informed by e-mail whenever you have made changes to your home page.

The lab will be implemented in several steps:

1.

Determine what information you want users to enter and write a database handler that stores user information in a file.

2.

Write a threaded guest book server and an applet submitting data to the server. Users will only be able to submit information, not change their information or remove themselves from your guest book. The applet and server will communicate using sockets and object serialization.

3.

Add the capability to create an HTML page containing a list of all guests.

4.

Add the capability to send a message to all registered guests.

5.

Make it possible for users to retrieve their own information, modify it and remove themselves from the list.

6.

Use a real database instead of a file. The server will connect to the database using JDBC (Java Database Connectivity).

7.

Create HTML pages dynamically using a servlet. The servlet - which will be ``linked in'' as a part of the web server - will query the database directly.

8.

Add search capabilities to your servlet.

9.

Let the applet and server communicate using RMI, Remote Method Invocation.

You will use the following parts of Java:

• File I/O
• Threads and thread synchronization
• Applets
• Interfaces as a way of separating abstract functionality from implementation
• Network communication using sockets
• Serialization of objects
• Java Database Connectivity (JDBC)
• Servlets
• Remote Method Invocation (RMI)