Portfolio
This page is designed to showcase some of my work; at the moment most of these come from various assignments completed whilst taking BSc Computer Science at Aberystwyth University.
Desktop/General Software
Except where otherwise noted, the desktop/general software found below is licensed under version 3 of the GNU General Public License, as published by the Free Software Foundation.
March 2011 – Java – ‘Cartooner’ cartoon creator
Developed as part of a group assignment with Rhys Short and Will Molyneux for the first year Software Development module, the aim was to work as a team to develop a graphical application for producing cartoon-like imagery using Java and its Swing widget toolkit.
The final program allows users to place a number of items in a drawing – including placement of various predefined imagery as well as speech bubbles. User are also able to rearrange and remove items as well as undo (or redo) all the various actions they may have taken (including movement and deletion of items). For the assignment we created two variants of the applications; the standard version can save the users current drawing to reopen it later, whilst the applet version is runnable in browsers where a suitable Java plugin is installed.
Please note that the copyright status of all downloads of Cartooner are currently All Rights Reserved to Robert Parker, Rhys Short and Will Molyneux; by downloading Cartooner you agree only to use it for you own personal use and not to redistribute it in any way, shape or form. I do hope to place Cartooner under an open source license at some point in the near future but I will need to discuss this with Will and Rhys first.
Downloads
October 2011 – Java – Concordance generator
Written for an assignment for the second year Program Design, Data Structures And Algorithms module, the aim to was to test our ability to make good choices of data structures and to design a good algorithm.
Via either a command line or Swing graphical user interface, the program takes a file containing index words and a source text file, and then creates a Concordance index of where the index words were found in the source text file (by line number) in addition to example of where such words appeared in the context of the original source text. The correct format of the ‘index file’ is a text file with a single word on each line and no punctuation except where it’s part a word; mean while the ‘source text’ file is a text file, such as a novel, spread over numerous lines.
Swing user interface
Downloads
These downloads will be made available in the next week (starting 14th November)
- ZIP archive containing source code, binaries, JavaDoc and example data
- Original assignment for which this was written
- rMy report submitted for the assignment
2011-12 – Java, Android & App Engine – Educational Mobile Geolocation application
Coming over the next few months. For a group assignment of the second year Software Development Life Cycle module we are tasked with building a mobile application targeted at getting younger children interested in Mathematics in a pirate-themed environment allowing players to plant treasure and then have their friends solve ‘pirate code’ in order to make their way from a clue to be able to dig up the treasure. The mobile application will run on the Android platform and is developed in Java using the standard Android SDK, whilst on the server-side we are using Java on Google’s App Engine service. My role within the group is as the main Android developer. I will be updating this page (and likely make blog posts) over the coming months as we work on this project.
Web Development/Programming
2006 onwards – Drupal CMS – 1st Lye Boys’ Brigade website
Since 2006 I have run a website for my local Boys’ Brigade company; since 2008 it has been based upon the Drupal content management system. This has less been a case of software development but more of choosing the right combination of CMS, theme and modules to create a suitable website; it has been an interesting experience during which I’ve picked up a lot of tips on running such websites. Currently the website is based on Drupal 6; I am to move to Drupal 7 in the coming months but will need to migrate from the Event module – which I currently use to provide features like an ‘upcoming camps/events’ list – to modules which support Drupal 7 (most likely a combination of the Date and Calendar modules).
The site is designed to provide company members and their families with information general news, information on upcoming camps and events as well as a place to view reports, photos and videos from past camps and events. It also has a role as part of promoting the company to potential new members and also provides existing authenticated members with a place to communicate online. In the past few months I’ve set up a Twitter feed, Facebook and Google+ pages to provide more ways of subscribing to updates from the website.
November 2011 – PHP & PostgreSQL – Web shop
PHP-based web shop which uses data from a PostgreSQL database written for an assignment of the second year Web Programming module. My work on this assignment served as an introduction to PHP, practical use of SQL statements and further use of XHTML, CSS and JavaScript; for a more in-depth report see here for the ‘About’ page of this assignment. I general aimed to develop a solution that was as generic/reusable as possible – but as we were working with a read-only database of product data certain content needed to be hard-coded which I would otherwise have stored in a database.
Links
- Front page
- Main file source code
- source of other pages can be viewed by replacing ‘.php’ with ‘.txt’ in file name/path