Dissertations
I am interested to supervise students on the following undergraduate theses. I'm also open to consider other titles in my areas of expertise, but please contact me well in advance to ensure adequate planning.
Web Standards: compliance and non-compliance
The thesis aims to investigate the reasons behind compliance and non-compliance to web standards. The student will survey a wide range of web sites and analyse compliance and non compliance to the main web standards. A selection of categories from the Dmoz catalogue will be used to identify the web sites to test. The research will be focusing on quantitative aspects and the student is expected to develop tools for HTML and/or CSS validation (building on top of existing solutions).
Improving the Performance of PHP-based web sites: an analysis of the different approaches
The student taking this thesis will do an in-depth analysis of the different approaches that can be used to improve the performance of PHP-based web sites. The student will select a number of appropriate approaches and evaluate their advantages and disadvantages in a number of significative scenarios. Reverse proxies, Zend byte-code optimisation, PHP accelerator and Alternative PHP cache are some examples of the technologies that should be analysed.
Ajax Toolkits: features and popularity
The student will compare the existing Ajax toolkits and investigate their features, usability, accessibility and popularity. A rudimentary spider will be developed, on top of existing Open Source Software, to analyse the popularity of the different Ajax toolkits in a selection of domains.
Content Management Systems
The student will review the mroe populare proprietary and Open Source content management systems and develop a rudimentary spiderto analyse their popularity.
Recent topics
Increasing security with banning software
This thesis will investigate the use of banning software to improve the security of Linux systems. The student taking this project will need to acquire familiarity with Linux, iptables and regular expressions. Part of the thesis will include development of additional banning components on top of existing banning software as Fail2Ban.
(This thesis has been assigned in Sept. 2009 and submitted in May 2010)