WebFund 2013W Lecture 3

Audio

An audio recording of the lecture given on January 15, 2013 is here.

Questions to answer

Please answer these questions by midnight Wednesday (January 16, 2013) on cuLearn. (the cuLearn version will be up later tonight)

1. What is the biggest constrain on the performance of web applications? (one word)
2. What is the standard that allows web browsers to call external programs? (acronym)
3. What HTTP command is normally used to request the contents of a page?
4. HTTP cookies are only sent to a web server when explicitly requested. (true or false)
5. Cookies are normally parsed by client-side JavaScript. (true or false)
6. In modern browsers, Which is more of a security risk, browser plug-ins or browser extensions? (plug-ins or extensions)
7. NPAPI and "Pepper" are standards for browser plug-ins. (true or false)
8. AJAX potentially increases the performance of web servers by offloading computation onto clients. (true or false)

Note: Question 2, the answer was CGI on the quiz. However, CGI is a standard for web servers calling external programs. NPAPI is a standard for browser plug-ins, but they are not external programs traditionally (they would be loaded into the browser's process), although now they are run in a separate process. In any case, the question should have read "What is the standard that allows web servers to call external programs."

Questions to ponder

1. What sort of applications are easy to implement as a web application? What are hard?
2. What is the history of the web technology stack? Which parts of this stack is more legacy at this point? Why?