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Fundamentals of JavaTM Servlets:
About Magercises

By MageLang Institute

[Course Notes | Magercises | Module Intro]

A Magercise is a flexible exercise designed to provide help according to the needs of the student. For example, some students will simply complete the exercise given the information and the task list in the Magercise body; some students may want a few hints while others may want a step-by-step guide to successfully complete a particular Magercise. Students may use as much or as little help as they need per Magercise. Moreover, since complete solutions are also provided, students can skip a few Magercises and still be able to complete future Magercises requiring the skipped ones.

The Anatomy of A Magercise

Each Magercise has a list of any prerequisite Magercises, a list of skeleton code for you to start with, links to necessary API pages, and a text description of the Magercise goal. In addition, the following information is available via five buttons:
  • Expected behavior:
    Launches an applet illustrating the desired behavior from your applet.

  • Table of contents:
    Brings up the table of contents for the course notes and the list of magercises.

  • Help:
    Gives you help or hints on the current Magercise (an annotated solution).

  • Solution:
    The <applet> tag and Java source resulting in the expected behavior.

  • API Documentation:
    A link directly to the online API documentation.

Magercise Design Goals

There are three fundamental magercise types:

"Blank screen"
The programmer is confronted with a "blank screen"; that is, the programmer creates the entire desired functionality.
Extension
The programmer extends the functionality of an existing, correctly working program.
Repair
The programmer repairs undesirable behavior in an existing program.

Where possible, the programmer is relieved from chores that are irrelevant or unrelated to the technique or concept under examination.

Where reasonable, a common thread runs through the magercises for each lab section.

Given the constraints of the technique or concept under examination, the magercises are made as interesting or useful as possible without presenting an overly-complex programming problem to the student.

Magercises execute via the Web unless a particular concept related to non-web execution is required, or the browser does not support the capabilities yet. In addition, magercises that must access Java features or library elements causing web security violations are not executed on the Web.

Copyright © 1998 MageLang Institute. All Rights Reserved.





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8-Jan-99
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