Feb 13

Finish (?) our client-side javascript discussion

• your projects
• topics from tuesday's notes that we didn't do then.

... if we get this far ...

server side

• where & how to host a server
• setting up a web server (e.g. apache)
• generating dynamic content
  • CGI (old school)
  • PHP (a "classic")
  • Flask (python app)
  • Express (node app, i.e. javascript)
  • Ruby on Rails
  • ... many other choices
• where to store the information
  • files on the server
  • a database (SQLite, MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, Redis, ...)
    • running on the same machine as the web server, or a different machine
• architecture types
  • monolith, microservices, REST, reverse proxy
• communication between client & server
  • PUT, GET
  • HTML forms
  • AJAX
• state : cookies and authentication

Note that these tools can generate any dynamic content (html, css, jpg) for any protocol (http web pages, smtp email, dns, ...).

more resources

• RealWorld - the mother of all demo apps
• wikipedia: web application

I would like us to explore these topics over the next few weeks, so that we've seen both ends of the client-server web machine. All of this is way too much for one person to look at in two weeks. I suggest that we break into two person teams, and that each team choose one server side technology to implement, and explain that tech to the rest of the class.

Maybe all do a QA engine ? (This is from a list of web app ideas . )

-- A QA engine --
Allow to login
Allow to add questions
Allow to answer to questions
Allow original user to choose the best question
Store the data somewhere

Then once we've had an exposure to both the client & server side of the game, we'll move to the ways to break things, taking up the "security" topic.