COMP519: Web Programming
Fall 2012

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Dr. David Reed for allowing me to use the material of his course on Web Programming. The slides, examples, and module design are his work. This help made this module possible. I am also in debt to Dr. Aleksei Fishkin who taught this module in the autumn of 2005 (also based on the course outline and notes of Dr. David Reed), and set up the original web pages for this site, which were modified into their current form.

Recomended Texts

These are texts that I have referred to, and will sometimes provide photocopies of small relevant sections in class.
The abbreviations in brackets are used in the table below to denote relevant chapters/sections for that particular subject.

Module Description

The World Wide Web is the dominant medium for communication, publication, and commerce in the new millenium. This module will present the fundamental technologies behind the Web, as well as techniques for designing, developing, and evaluating Web-based applications. Topics will include HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, Dynamic HTML and JavaScript, HTML forms and CGI scripting, Perl, PHP and (given time) Java Applets and dynamic web programming using Ajax.

Module Goals

• To develop an understanding of the technology and protocols underlying World Wide Web.
• To become familiar with the common tools and techniques for developing Web-based applications, both client-side and server-side.
• To develop a working knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, Java, Perl, and PHP as languages for developing Web applications.

Assessment

The module will be assessed by formal examination and continuous assessment which contribute 25% and 75%, respectively, to the overall mark. The continuous component will consist of four assignments contributing 75%. In summary, marks will be given as follows:

Tentative schedule of assignment deadlines

Important: You are required to submit your assignments in two fashions:

1. You need to have your webpages online, so that I can view them, use them, etc in order to test them properly. This is especially important for the third and fourth assignments as they interact with the computer science server in ways that can't easily be tested just by "looking at the source code" of the pages.
2. For a proper record of your submissions, you also need to submit the source code via the Coursework Submission System. A direct link to the submission page for this course can be found here. Please ensure that your files are submitted to this system by 5pm on the date the assignment is due. If you have more than one file, you can submit them as a single (compressed) combined file.

Note: Each assignment will be due at 5pm on the date specified. Assignments will not be rescheduled except in extreme circumstances.

Generic marking cutoffs and late submission penalties will apply. (See the Code of Practice on Assessment for details.)
Any student who fails to submit work amounting to more than 30% of the total will be reported to the Chair of the Board of Studies in Computer Science as soon as this situation occurs. The attendance of any sudent will be deemed unsatisfactory if it falls below 75%.

Policy on Collaboration

The University policy on plagiarism and collusion is spelled out in the Student Handbook. Unless otherwise permitted, assignments must be the sole work of the student -- i.e. collaboration on the design or coding of a program is not allowed (unless specifically permitted by the lecturer).

You are, of course, allowed to use the course notes, and examples provided in them, as a basis for your own work for the assessments. The use of other sources should be clearly documented in your source code (use comments, as appropriate to your particular code, to do this).

Remote connection to the UL CS Servers

If you are running a Windows machine, a good program to use to remotely connect to the UL CS server is PuTTY. If you download and install this (free) program, you want to use the following information:

• Host name: Try either   linux1.csc.liv.ac.uk   or   linux2.csc.liv.ac.uk
• Port: 22
• Protocol: SSH

For further details or other options, please see the Department's guide for SSH access.

Editing your webpages

I strongly urge each student to familiarize yourself with the Unix environment, and, in particular, the use of a (non-graphical) text editor such as "vi" or "pico". Using such an editor will avoid certain pitfalls later on when we discuss CGI programming. (These problems arise when you transfer a Windows text file to a Unix system which results in embedded charaters in the file that the CGI processor can't handle.) Being familiar with a text editor such as vi or pico also allows you to remotely log into the CS system, using PuTTY for example, and edit your webpages in this fashion.

Don't forget to make your webpages visible to others by changing the file permission. To do so, you can use the Unix "chmod" command. For example typing the command "chmod a+r index.html" will make the file index.html readable by everyone so, provided it's in your public_html directory, everyone should be able to view it in their web browser.

Location of your webpages

If you have your webpages in the proper location (i.e. your public_html directory) and with the file permissions set correctly, you should be able to use a web address of the form
      http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~m2xxxxx/
to locate your home page. Note: The "m2xxxxx" should, of course, be replaced by your own user ID. Recall that, without specifying a particular file, a web browser always looks for a file called "index.html" (and others like "index.htm" or "index.php", in some order).

Tentative Schedule

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Markup Validator

Here is a link to the W3C's online validator. This can be used to check if your HTML code conforms to standards. Important! To use this correctly, your HTML document should contain a Document Type Declaration so that the validator can detect the standards that apply to your document.

From the page above, you can also find links to other validators that can be used to check for broken links, correctness of external style sheets, etc.

Student Questionnaires

This module will have a student appraisal in the from of questionnaires at the end of the term. We strongly encourage you to complete it.

Validate HTML
Validate CSS