IFB104 Building IT Systems

This is the first part of a two-part assignment. This part is worth 21% of your final grade for IFB104. Part B will be worth a further 4%. Part B is intended as a last-minute extension to the assignment, thereby testing the maintainability of your solution to Part A and your ability to work under time pressure. The instructions for completing Part B will not be released until Week 12. Whether or not you complete Part B you will submit only one solution, and receive only one mark, for the whole 25% assignment.

This a complex and challenging assignment. If you are unable to solve the whole problem, submit whichever parts you can get working. You will receive partial marks for incomplete solutions.

Motivation

In the age of the Internet we’re bombarded with entertainment options and new ones emerge every day. It’s often observed that we spend more time scrolling through menus than watching programmes! Here you will develop a software application that allows its users to efficiently plan their entertainment options by browsing lists of upcoming events in their preferred entertainment categories and generate a personalised entertainment schedule. Your Python application will have a Graphical User Interface that allows its user to select upcoming events and then export an HTML document describing the events they want to see or attend. This document can be examined in a standard web browser or printed as a hardcopy. This “capstone” assignment is designed to incorporate all of the concepts taught in IFB104. To complete it you will need to:

(a) use Tkinter to create an interactive Graphical User Interface;

(b) download web documents using a Python script and use pattern matching to extract specific elements from them; and (c) generate an HTML document integrating the extracted elements, presented in an attractive, easy-to-read format. Goal Your aim in this assignment is to develop an interactive “app” which allows its users to preview upcoming entertainment events downloaded from the web. There must be at least three distinct categories of entertainment available, with at least six distinct events in each category at any time. Most importantly, the online web documents from which you collect your events must be ones that are updated on a regular basis, either daily or weekly, so your program needs to be robust to changes in the source documents. To help you develop and debug your code, you will also include the ability to “work offline” using previously downloaded web documents that are never changed.

For the purposes of this assignment you have a free choice of which categories of entertainment events your application will offer, provided there are always at least six items per category, the events are updated frequently, and the information available for each event includes its name, the date/time, and at least one additional piece of information such as an image or a textual description. The upcoming entertainment events could be:

• television programmes,

• radio programmes,
• movies in the cinema,
• live plays,
• community events,
• sporting matches,
• music concerts,
• video game releases,
• streaming media releases,
• home video (DVD and BluRay) releases,
• etc.

However, whichever categories you choose, you must confirm that the online web documents are updated frequently. Appendix A below lists many web sites which may be suitable for this assignment, but you are encouraged to find your own of personal interest. Note: An obvious source for entertainment events is sport. However, you cannot rely on lists of upcoming sporting events being updated “out of season”. Therefore, if you choose to use a sports-based category, you must confirm that the sport is being played during the period in which this assignment will be developed and assessed, i.e., mid-April to mid-June 2019! Using the events appearing in the various categories online you are required to build an IT system with the following general architecture.