Help on GUI design of the flight reservation assignment

[Rudy Yeung]

I think some of you should be working on this flight reservation assignment, and I need to have some directions from you. I understand that a robust flight reservation program should take in the customer information such as his name, address, telephone number and account number etc. This means that I need to design a GUI to provide inputs for the customer information and also a completely new table(file) to store those information in addition to the basic flight reservation or enquiry according to the requirement specification given by Sun. Please justify my thinking.

[Jerry Pulley]

Rudy,
The assignment is not to produce a real-world flight reservation system for use by a major airline, it's to complete the system specified by the instructions.
Jerry

[Rudy Yeung]

Jerry,
I agree with you to certain extent that we just follow the requirement specification given by Sun. However, I think providing the client's very basic information is very necessary during the flight booking. Otherwise, the whole program is completely useless and we just see the number of seats for a particular flight at the database server keeps on decrementing magically without knowing which customer has actually reserved the seats. This does not make any sense from both a programmer and client point of view. One thing that bothers me much is that the assignment under the session "What to do if you have a question" explicitly states that these notes deliberately leave some issues unspecified, and some problems unraised... (SEE BELOW). Do you know anyone or maybe yourself who passes the exam. without really implementing the user's tracking?
Rudy
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What to do if you have a question
You may find that you want to ask for further explanation of some part of these notes, perhaps to seek permission to solve a problem in a particular way. These notes deliberately leave some issues unspecified, and some problems unraised. Your ability to think through these issues, in the face of realistically imperfect specifications, and come to a tenable solution is something upon which you are being graded.
You should consider the options available and make a decision about how to address the problem yourself. This decision making process is part of the marking scheme, and as such it is crucially important that you provide documentation of your choice. Be sure to describe the options you considered, the perceived benefits and weaknesses of each, and why you chose the solution you did. You will not be marked on the choice that you made, but rather on the consistency of your decision making process and your adherence to other aspects of these notes during that decision making process.
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[Jerry Pulley]

Rudy,
Real-world requirements are rarely complete, and the Developer assignment certainly tests the programmer's ability to make sound judgements in the absence of absolutely complete specifications. One criterion for such judgement is whether the system produced exceeds the client's requirements - no client is going to be happy paying for functionality he didn't ask for. You'll find plenty of occasions during the assignment to invoke the paragraph you quoted and make design decisions without going beyond the functionality required by the instructions.
I've corresponded with several people who've completed the exam and earned their certification. Some of them have produced the bare minimum required and some have gone a bit further, but I've never heard of anyone going to the lengths you suggest.
That said, my own design exceeds the requirements in a couple of minor ways (and now that I'm testing and debugging the server side, I'm considering trimming it back somewhat.) Build what you think is the right system, but remember that Sun doesn't award extra points for going beyond the requirements.
Jerry

[Rudy Yeung]

Jerry,
Thank you for your advice. I will take your words.
Rudy