Meeting 1

Minutes of meeting 1 (6/3/07)

People present - James, Feng-Ming, Rob, Mark

Project Diary format

Discussed possibilities for project diary, with consensus that a blog will be best suited to our needs.It will enable all group members to add informal thoughts, findings etc and can be edited to a final submission if necessary.

Project Definition

Discussed alternatives for project theme. Possibilities considered included:

• Online family tree


• E-Commerce website


• Online rental service


• Wiki-themed site

Online family tree

Considered as we have all covered this area but quickly dismissed as it might not be very interesting as a lot of the work has been done previously.
Finished product could be rather plain and uninspiring

Wiki-themed site

Seriously considered as it would suit the web-based theme very well.
Could require huge database, even if narrowed down to a specific theme/area.
Would require massive initial database, with updates being infequent and small, which is the opposite of what we were hoping for.

Online rental service / E-commerce website

Essentailly alternatives to the same idea.
Meets the requirements of the project, and satifies our own aims.
Considered an acheivable project by all, with scope to showcase our abilities.


Project agreed as an e-commerce website, and we narrowed the field down to an online bookstore.

Successful alternatives available which will aid research.
Wealth of 'real' data available to us
Natural primary key for database in ISBN number

Next meeting - 8/3/07 12pm

Before next meeting

All - draft submissions for deliverable 1
think about database needs
look into current technologies

Mark/Rob - concentrate on JDBC / SQL
James/Feng-Ming - concentrate on HTML / JSP