Final exam

12 May 2019   PDF version

This is a take-home exam. You may use whatever materials you like, including the source code that we have written and any notes/links provided. If you use quotes or ideas from any source other than your own mind, you must cite the source and use quotation marks appropriately.

You may not do this exam in groups. Your responses must be entirely your own. If I notice suspicious similarity between the answers of two or more students, or if your answers are copied from another source, your score will suffer.

All of your answers should be concrete and pertain specifically to the project we implemented this semester. I expect about a page of explanation per question. Submit your answers by email to christopher.league@liu.edu.

  1. Feature request: Most static web servers treat file names as case-sensitive, just as the Linux file system does. However, some servers have configurable options that allow case-insensitive path matches – for example mod_speling for Apache.

    If a site is being served with case-insensitivity enabled, it means that a link <a href="About.HTML"> can direct us to a file named ABOUT.html.

    Is our webgc tool case-sensitive or case-insensitive by default? Does that depend on whether it’s running on Linux (which has a case-sensitive file system), or on Mac/Windows (which are usually case-insensitive)?

    Describe in detail what changes would be needed to support a command-line option -i, --ignore-case that would enable webgc to garbage-collect assets correctly when the site is coded with the assumption of case-insensitivity.

  2. Testing: our webgc library uses manual unit tests for several of its modules. Read about property-based testing, and in particular the Python hypothesis library. Propose a way to apply property-based testing to some aspect of our webgc code. Which module would you target first? What are some examples of specific properties that could be verified? (You can write your examples in English; you don’t need to write Python code directly to answer this.) How would property-based testing increase your confidence in the code, compared to example-based testing?