Software Development  ( Year 12 )

Approved programming languages for the accredited study in 2011

 Students will use one programming language from the accompanying list, to develop purpose-designed solutions.

In the development of solutions, students should be able to:

• develop a graphical user interface (GUI), for use in mobile computing devices, such as laptops, personal digital

assistants, gaming consoles, mobile phones

• construct and use data structures, for example multidimensional arrays, records, queues and stacks

• design, construct and use files (not databases) to store and retrieve data

• design and apply data validation techniques

• use program control structures: selection, iteration and sequencing.

The purpose-designed solutions will entail the use of objects, methods and their properties, and event-driven programming.

List of approved languages

• Basic (object-oriented variations only, e.g. VB.NET)
• C++
• C#
• Objective-C
• Pascal (object-oriented variations only, e.g. Delphi)
• Java
• Perl
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby

With all of the above languages, databases are not to be used to support the construction of solutions.

Students should be able to demonstrate the highest level of achievement using only the selected programming language ....

How would you read the exclusion of databases in the construction of solutions  ?

Here are comments from other teachers ( my responses in red ):

1)       “ technically, a table is a data construct for use in a relational database and nothing else ... “  .   Tables are part of the data structures listed (underlined) above. So, we use relational database structures (records, arrays, queues, stacks )  but can only save to files but not databases ?

2)      I remember a lot of people going way overboard with complex PHP/MySQL constructions.  It's my guess that VCAA wants students to concentrate on more 'pure' programming rather than complex and narrow database engineering.   Instead, the bulletin wants students to use relatively simple data files (i.e. random, sequential) with records or discrete data in them.
--  Is constructing a 2 table solution in MySQL is much harder than one in Access ? Is simple use of PHP/MySQL overboard or complex ??
--- Are we being asked to implement a sequential file solution as would be found on magnetic tapes ? Or are we going to implement a random access file in our solution but can’t use databases ?
--  More worrying is the idea of records saved to a text file or a flat file structure to implement a solution with the loss of ability to process transactions unless you import the whole file, search, edit and then write back the whole file each time.
-- There is also a push to bring back teaching of searching and sorting and 2D arrays.  I last did that back in the early 90s.
-- It seems to me there is a desire to program for programming’s sake. Eg. Why sort manually with a nested loop when PHP can sort a set of records with one command?