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CS 484: Secure Web Application Development

Final Project checkpoint 0

Form a group and come up with an idea

Due: Thursday, September 12, 2024 at 2:00:00 PM

This is the first checkpoint for your final project. The most important things you must do before turning it in are:

  • Find a group to work with
  • Come up with a basic project idea
  • Create a GitHub repository for your project and share it with your team and the course staff

Project requirements

The requirements for the project idea are:

It must not be a CRUD app

CRUD stands for create, retrieve, update, delete (common database operations). A CRUD app is typically an application that builds a user interface around those database operations (and not much else). As I mentioned in class - CRUD apps make the world go round, there are literally millions of them.

It must not be a carbon copy of something that already exists

A large part of our goal for this course is to (a) motivate you to create something unique that you can show off during job interviews, and (b) give you the chance to design the architecture and implementation for the app from the ground up. Thus, while it can be very useful to re-implement an app idea that already exists, in this case you need to come up with something new. It doesn’t have to be the most unique thing ever, but it has to be non-trivially different than other things that alrady exists.

This requirement, like many others, is a great reason to get started early on your project idea. I am super excited to help students brainstorm project ideas, whether it’s at office hours, on Piazza, or quickly after class. The more time you spend on this now, the higher likelihood that you come up with something fun, and the higher likelihood that you actually are motivated to work on finishing the project later on in the semester when things are getting busy.

The difficulty of implementation must be proportional to the number of people in your group

This is also a very vague but important requirement - the amount of complexity should be roughly proportional to the number of people in your group, with the excpetion that if you’re a group of one, I’ll expect you to do the work of a group of two. There might also be extra credit later on that is only available for groups of two or more students.

The best way to determine whether your idea is “substantial” enough is to ask me, via Piazza or via office hours. I will provide feedback on your project idea after this deadline is over to let you know where you’re at on the “substantial” scale, and recommend changes to your project plan if what you’ve come up with is either too big or too small.

Project inspiration

If you’re having trouble coming up with a project idea, here are some things that have worked in the past / that I would expect to be good project ideas that aren’t TOO hard but will end up being impressive if you do them correctly:

  • Something to do with UIC specifically - helping students choose classes, get around campus, or things like that. Note that this is UIC specifically - if the implementation is generic and would be just as relevant at another school, not as interesting.
  • Something that uses Large Language Models - there are a lot of very cheap APIs you can use online to summarize text, provide natural language suggestions, or many other options. There’s no requirement that you use paid APIs in your project, but there’s no requirement that you don’t either.
  • Something that uses in-person interactions - there are a lot of cool things you can do with QR codes, NFC, or other in-person interaction methods that can be really fun to implement and use. I have a handful of writable NFC tags that I would be happy to give you a few of if you get started on a project that could make use of them.
  • Something that uses a lot of data - if you’re interested in data science or AI or just want to learn more about how to work with data, there are a lot of public datasets available that you can use to build a cool project. You can also scrape them (like the Costco discount tracker project example), but be aware that sometimes that can take longer than you would expect to get right.

Deployment

For this checkpoint, you don’t need to deploy anything, or even really think hard about it. But you will EVENTUALLY need to deploy your app such that it is available 24/7 when I am going to look at it to grade it (both the MVP that’s due earlier and the final project due at the end of the semester). It will need to be available via HTTPS, and I will need to be able to use all of the app’s functionality.

My strong recommendation is to set up a deployment pipeline that deploys to Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, or other similar services that build your app from GitHub and deploy it automatically. This will be the best way to get experience with modern app deployment techniques, as well as just keep the app up and running.

It is also acceptable to deploy your app on a VPS or other server that you control, as long as incoming valid https connections can be made (you need to configure this yourself). I would expect this to be helpful if you already have a severver (perhaps with a nice GPU) that you would use for a self-hosted LLM idea that could cost lots of money if you used an external service. I recommend not doing this unless you have a good reason to do so and are familiar with self-hosting web services. Please ask on Piazza if you have an architecture or project idea and want to know the best way to try to deploy it without spending much / any money on hosting/services.

Deliverables

The two deliverables are your repository (it can be empty, but you can also get started on it if you want), and submitting This form. Remember that this assignment is not worth any points, but if you don’t get started finding a good project idea, I will be grading your later checkpoints based on my personal opinion rather than the expectations that we set together.

What happens if you don’t turn in the checkpoint?

Nothing besides the MVP (due in week 12) and the final project (due at the end of week 15) are graded for points. The things that you propose in each checkpoint set expectations for what your group will do and how you’ll do it. If you don’t set those expectations, I’ll just grade everything based on what I think a good project is expected to do - you could receive full points because what you did was actually fine, or you could receive zero points because you’re implementing a CRUD app or what you chose isn’t substantial enough or what you chose is a carbon copy of something else that exists out in the world.