Programming | C / C++ » Justification of the Proposed Solution

Source: http://www.doksinet Laurie Copley 9032 Bourne Grammar School 26202 Justification of the proposed solution There are many different solutions to the problem definition: Using different programming languages, different visual support programs for programming languages and different methods of doing so. Different methods are more suitable than others so the correct method will have to be chosen. The method I have chosen is using Microsoft’s Visual basic code with .NET framework Visual Basic is built around the NET framework for Microsoft, this adds advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that the language is able to perform most features that other programming languages are able to (such as C#). Visual Basic has built in features allowing me to write and read from text files very easily which will be very handy when it comes to saving and reading from the text file database. Visual Basic also has many very good controls and objects predefined and created on the

screen, they can be dragged and dropped with use of a form designer making it very easy to create very nice atheistically pleasing GUIs which can solve the problem of making the program pleasant to use, the objects also have many useful controls such as selected index changed which helps greatly when triggering sub routines making the program useable and efficient. A large disadvantage of Visual basic is that it is only supported on Microsoft so it cannot be used, (unless an emulator is implemented) in other operating systems such as Mac OS or a Linux based system such as Ubuntu. The main reason why I have chosen to use Visual Basic is that it is able to do all the things which the problem definition requires and is very easily programmed with a lot of support on the web and in the user documentation. Other programming languages I could use for example could be: C#. C# is an extension of software writing code C++ which is extension of C Benefits of using C# is that it is simple,

modern, general-purpose, object-oriented programming language. C# also uses the NET framework, this makes it more difficult for other operating systems to run the code as it is Microsoft orientated. It is able to write this for other operating systems using GTK+ although this is not required for the problem definition so it will not be the correct solution. C# is slightly more complicated than Visual Basic and there is not as much support so it will not be as suitable. Java. Java offers a lot of advantages to developers, one of the main advantages are that Java is a very simple easy to use code. The reason that why Java is much simpler than C++ is because Java uses automatic memory allocation and garbage collection where else C++ requires the programmer to allocate memory and to collect garbage. Java, like C# and visual basic is also object orientated so it will be more suitable. Java, unlike the other languages I Source: http://www.doksinet Laurie Copley 9032 Bourne Grammar School

26202 have looked at it is “platform independent”; this is a big advantage because it means that it can be used on different platforms other than just windows as long as they have Java installed. This means it can be used on apple computers and even Linux Some disadvantages of Java are that it is significantly slower than C# and visual basic, the user interface is yet to be desired. Although you can change the look and feel most people think that the default is very ugly. For data storage I could have chosen to use Microsoft Excel. One reason why I might have chosen Microsoft Excel is that it is more efficient for storing data. You are able to put the data in different cell references which will be useful when recalling the data to display to the user, for example displaying student names to the teacher. This gives it an advantage over other possible data storage programs such as Microsoft Word or Notepad. Microsoft Excel, like Microsoft Word can be password protected and

encrypted. This is useful because it can stop the students from editing point balances themselves. Another good thing that Microsoft Excel has is that it is incorporated with Visual Basic so they can link together well. A disadvantage for using Microsoft Excel is that it can be slow when loading up, saving and closing within a Visual Basic program. A large limitation for Microsoft excel is only one person can open and view/save the excel document at a time. This is why I have chosen against using excel. Instead I will be using Notepad, as the idea would be is to create different notepad documents for each student so it is less likely to have collisions. Notepad has a password protection so the students couldn’t change their data files themselves but the most appropriate option and most efficient would simply be encrypting the notepad contents then decrypting when the program is reading it