Purposes of this assignment:

• To teach you the basics of:
  • Servlets
  • Session management
  • JSP

General idea of the assignment:

You have already written an Animals! game, storing your data as an XML file. The idea here is simply to put it on a server.

Details:

Start with a static web page that describes the game, and asks the user to click a "Ready" button when he/she has thought of an animal.

Use Java's session tracking API to track the session and make it work as a conversation. Each returned page should display a complete list of the questions that were asked, and how they were answered.

Allow the user to play multiple games, but only display questions and answers for the current game. Previous games can be forgotten. (New animals should be remembered.)

Use JSP to create all returned web pages (after the initial page). You may want to use more than one .jsp file.

Use Model-View-Controller.

• The servlet is the controller, and should do no computation that is specific to the Animals! game--it just "directs traffic."
• Your Java program is the model, and does no I/O to the user. (It does do I/O to the animals.xml file, however.) It communicates with the JSP by passing Strings.
• The JSP is the view. (Or JSPs, if you have more than one.)

Use port 8080. Or if you need to use some other port, make that clear on the initial page.

Test your program both with and without cookies enabled.

Note: If you had trouble with converting the Animals! game to use a DOM tree, you may instead use the version I gave you that uses a BinaryTree class. You will have to add some code to load and save binary trees on the server.

Due date:

Sunday, November 12, before midnight. Zip up the entire project and submit it via Blackboard.

This gives you about two weeks. I don't think the program is particularly difficult, but you are using a lot of new things all at once, and they are all important.