Calendar Description

Current description:

Internet Application Programming

Design and implementation of Internet application programs. Topics include: fundamentals of the Web, introduction to client/server architectures, Internet programming, Web browsers, hypertext links, network programming.

New description:

Systems Programming for Internet Applications

An introduction to the upper computational stack: language-based virtual machines, desktop environments, and web applications. Topics: dynamic libraries, scripting and functional languages, interpreters, compilation, databases, remote procedure calls, and performance and security concerns in modern distributed applications.

Assumed Background

Students should:

know how to program imperative and object-oriented programs (Java-style), to the point of creating simple GUI-based programs and implementing standard simple data structures (lists, trees) and associated algorithms (search).
have some background in systems programming, particularly UNIX systems programming. As such, they should know about processes and threads as abstractions and should be exposed to concurrency and network sockets.
have interacted with modern websites.

Learning Objectives

Be able to partition distributed application functionality between client and server in order to make appropriate trade-offs for latency, bandwidth, reliability, and security.

Learn how to use closures and other meta-programming methods to create efficient, expressive programs in a distributed systems context.

Understand how to create and use databases as a persistent store for distributed, online applications such as web applications, including how to design schemas that are both scalable and reliable.

Be able to choose whether an SQL or a NoSQL-type database is appropriate for a given application.

Learn how to create efficient code (in time and space) in dynamic languages such as JavaScript and PHP.

Be able to implement a simple yet responsive (low-latency user interaction) web application consisting of client side code, server side code, and a database for a persistent store.

Be able to create distributed applications that do not contain common security vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery, and SQL injection attacks.

Learn how to choose appropriate data representation and exchange protocols for distributed applications, including the trade-offs between using XML, JSON, and custom representations.

Topics

Functional programming

closures and their applications
higher order programming

Databases

data models: ER, relational, object, indexing, join
query languages: SQL, noSQL

Concurrency

locking, transactions
basic control mechanisms
multi core

Distributed Systems

web technologies
load balancing, fault-tolerance