EG-259 Web Applications Technology

Welcome to the on-line lecture pages for EG-259 Web Applications Technology. The content of each lecture is a DokuWiki Wiki page which can be viewed, printed as a portable handout [and edited!]. The same materials can also be presented as a slide show (this feature uses the s5 plugin). The review problems and homework problems for each lecture are stored on the Blackboard site. The notes for a week's lectures will normally be available on the preceding Friday. I strongly recommend that you print a copy of the pages and bring it to the lecture with you so that you can add your own additional notes.

If you are enrolled on the module, you can discuss the course at the Oremi community site to which you will have been registered.

The Practical Experiences

Most of these are expected to be done as Self Directed Learning activities outside the formal contact hours.

Week 1: Gathering Your Web Development Toolkit
Contact Hour 6: Installing an Ubuntu Web Server Appliance as a Hosted Virtual Machine + Installing Drupal
Case Study: CSS for Layout - Not Examined.

The Lectures

Contact Hour 1: Module Introduction

Part 1: Foundations of Web Applications Technology

The fundamentals of Web technology are the Internet networking protocols (TCP/IP), the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), the HTTP protocol, the markup language XHTML and the style definition language CSS. Although it will probably be revision, we still need to go over these topics in order to lay a good foundation for the client- and server-side programming issues that will come later.

Contact Hour 2: Fundamentals of Web Applications Technology
Contact Hour 3: Notes: The Structural and Presentation Layers Tutorial Case Study with HTML5 and CSS3
Contact Hour 4: Forms and Web User Interfaces
Contact Hour 5: Web Applications

Part 2: Client-side Programming

The client-server model of computation has one major flaw: every time the client needs to pass data to a server, there will be a network delay. To reduce this delay and give the user the illusion that his or her web application has similar performance to a natively executing desktop program, we need to give the client user interface (usually an XHTML form displayed in a browser) some intelligence so that can perform some operations locally inside the browser without involving the server. On the Web, the standard way to do this is by writing scripts in the JavaScript language. In this part of the module we will examine in some detail how JavaScript can be used to program the client.