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Syllabus for Building Web Applications

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Books referred to below:

Week 1 - The World of Web Applications

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Week 2 - Great and Powerful Oz: the Relational Database Management System

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Week 3 - Interactivity and Forms

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Week 4 - Statelessness and Related Political Problems

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Week 5 - Users

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Week 6 - The Big Picture: Application Architecture

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Week 7 - Security

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Week 8 - XML, Web Services and Other Buzzwords

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Week 9 - Caching: Time vs. Space

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Week 10 - Traffic Analysis and Performance Testing

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Week 11 - The Human Element (Part 1): Interface Design and Usability Testing

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Week 12 - The Human Element (Part 2): Collaborative Development

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Week 13 - The Physical Element: Network Design & Data Center Security

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Final Project

Build a web application that has the following characteristics:

The application should use a templating system and a design paradigm like MVC that separates core business logic, display formatting, and interface logic.

In addition to the application's source code, submit a write-up that details the security and scalability problems the application does and does not solve. What are ways that the application prevents attacks? To what kinds of attacks is it open? On what axes does the application scale simply or elegantly? On what axes does the application scale poorly or expensively? For each security or scalability shortfall of the application be sure to include a discussion of why the problem isn't solved due to cost, complexity, time, insignificant risk, or other reason.

A 2 - 3 page proposal outlining the term project is due at the start of Week 7. The proposal should include the general area of the project (such as a photo album, message board, dating service), the features of the project that will satisfy the list of characteristics above, and a preliminary database schema.

Supplemental Bibliography