Hi! Just wanna ask for ideas about topics that I can use for our thesis.

[huniebabe]

I'm an IT student and our thesis is about making an information system. (e.g. Virtual Tour, games, payroll system, enrollment system) But those examples are very common that's why I wanna ask for something unique. (Forgive me if I may have a wrong grammar. I'm not from an english-dialect Country. ^____^)

[Ancient Dragon]

Movie collection system. Read barcodes from movie dvd, look up the information (actors, description, etc) on the internet, and create a local SQL server (e.g. free MySQL) database of that information. You could do lots of stuff with this such as search for specific movie, produce a list of all movies in the database sorted in any order the user wants, or even play the movie.

[diafol]

How about an academic timetable for an institution/uni/school's lecturers/teachers and students/pupils. With ability to export to GoogleCal (via iCal format). This is something I play with in my spare time - weekly/fortnightly timetables (repeat events), teaching blocks (semesters). There are some libraries out there to help, so you don't have to start from scratch:

http://kigkonsult.se/iCalcreator/index.php

[huniebabe]

About the movie collection system, it sounds very interesting. But what's the language are we gonna use there? Java? Coz our prof wants us to use java in our thesis, well it's optional but he'll give credits to those who will.

[Ancient Dragon]

You can use any language you want -- most likely the language you know best. C, C++, VB.NET, C#, all will work. I'm not familiar with java so I don't know about it but most likely you can write it with that too. There's not much to reading barcodes -- just buy a very cheap barcode reader and it will dump the barcode contents into the computer's keyboard buffer just as if you typed them yourself.

[diafol]

WHat is it with universities and java? Jeez. It shouldn't really matter which language you use, as long as it's 'distributable' and can work on target servers.

In addition to those pointed out by AD, you could use php/MySQL or even something like meteor / MongoDB.

One useful aspect of the last suggestion is that you may find it easier to create your own API as the data structure is pretty much json. So you could support other sites requesting your data either in json or as rss. Loads of possibilities.

BTW - if you go down the movie collection route, there are loads of great resources out there. There is an (unofficial?) imdb API: http://mymovieapi.com/ so you can use that to insert data or to return searches. Cool.

If you're going to save any movie data though, your DB tables may have to be normalised to the nth degree - no pun intended :) as data needs to be distributed among many tables, e.g. movie itself, actors, directors, producers, genres, writers, composers, countries... and their corresponding link tables.

[Reverend Jim]

I'd be interested in using the imdb api for an app, however, I have no idea where to start. Are there any resources for a complete noob in this interface? For example, showing someone the code for a "hello, world" program in python is useless if they don't already know how to install the framework needed to run the app.

[Ancient Dragon]

Here is one place to start. It's just a socket program that executes an http request and get the return results. I have a similar c++ program to find out if a list lf IP addresses are spammers or not -- www.StopForumSpam.com has such a database.

[Reverend Jim]

It's much simpler on second glance than it was at first. Looks like all I have to do is use the WebBrowser coontrol, navigate to a URL then wait for the response and parse it.

[diafol]

Exactly like DW api :) Parse the json response

[jwenting]

still waiting for that random project idea generator...
If just some kid were to make one, we'd never have to answer the thousands of questions like this we get every semester again.

[Reverend Jim]

@diafol - got the new code working. It's really quite simple and it will save me a ton of data entry. Thanks for pointing out the imdb api.

[diafol]

@diafol - got the new code working. It's really quite simple and it will save me a ton of data entry. Thanks for pointing out the imdb api.

Sweet