A Web Database Development Course and a Unique Problem-Solving Project

Today, the content of most Web sites contain dynamically generated pages that present information stored in a database, and computer science students are eager to learn how to develop these database-driven Web sites. This paper presents how students at the University of Houston- Clear Lake (UHCL) learn about Web database development in a course that emphasizes project-building activities, and it looks at the implementation details of a successful student project, the Online Address Book. Four unique problems and the solutions that were implemented in this project are explained: 1) editing multiple students' data; 2) checking the data with a regular expression; 3) stale session variables; 4) potential security violations.