Hi Everyone, i am a final year computer science student.I was thinking of building a secure online voting system for my university's student union elections process. I wondering if anyone has an idea on how i can go about implementing the system.I would really appreciate any help you give to me.Thanks

Not sure why you choose JSP? It would be easier to program uisng PHP and ASP and there are tons of open source around.

There is a lot to think about here...

First, are you going to build the whole system in JSP? Using a combination of servlets with JSP would be much better.

Is everything going to be secure? Using certificates?

How are you going to verify that the user is who they say they are and stop them from voting twice, or three time, etc...

Regards,

Nate

Yes i am planning to make the system as secure as possible, i was thinking of using digital certificate or SSL to secure the system. Just dont know how to go about implementing these security features. Need tips

Don't go and implement those things yourself. There's many libraries available to take care of such things for you that do a far better job than what you could come up with.
Security is a complex issue, and very hard to get right (be careful selecting your tools therefore, many of them are bound to have serious flaws).

SSL for example starts at your webserver but doesn't stop there.

ALWAYS doublecheck all your input data, both clientside and serverside validation should take place on it.
Login details should be stored such that they can't be decrypted (just in case your database server gets compromised.
If that sounds impossible, it isn't (I've done it myself)

As said, use a proper architecture. Servlets, Javabeans, and JSP (using JSTL of course, not scriptlets).
Forget (IMO) about EJB, they're overkill for almost every scenario.

Write proper analysis and design documents. Those are IMO even more important than the actual code for a small project like this, especially in an academic setting (of course in the real world the code is the only thing that counts, but if the design sucks so will the code and most likely it will never get done).

Hi, thanks for the info, i will start the design, and see how it goes from there, but pls if you have any other ideas i could use to make my online voting system more unique do let me know.

Don't make it unique. Make it functional.

Unique sites don't get used. Functional sites do.

Regards,

Nate

Correct. And employers don't look for unique solutions, they look for working solutions that can be maintained by others when you're gone.

Hi, i am trying to install apache tomcat server on my computer, but it seems its inaccessible from the tomcat website, do u know any other way in which i can download tomcat, or if there are better web servers i can use with JSP to build my online voting system. Thanks

hi
u can use jbuilder
it is very powerful program and it will save alot for u
u can build ur js page easily
it has built in tomcat
by the way my graduation project is also about e-voting