Course description
The web has become the most basic technology of interaction — between people and machines, people and data, and, most importantly, people and other people. Though the core web interaction is simple — a client sends a request to a server, which replies — services of incredible sophistication and scale have been built around it. In this class, students will learn to lay out a web page; make the page responsive to the user; embed a form for taking user input; and create a simple server to receive, store, manipulate, and return that input.
Communication Lab: Web will introduce you to three critical pieces of web infrastructure -- client, server, and data store -- and their interactions. A web client is a browser (or indeed any other web-aware tool) that gets data from (or sends data to) a web server on behalf of the user, as when your browser receives and renders a web page. The server is the software that receives and replies to requests from web clients. Data stores are ways for the server to gather and organize data in a way that persists between client requests, as when data you send to the server is stored for later use.
Students will build and use all three elements -- client, server, datastore -- using HTML+CSS, the design language of the web; Sinatra, a programming language specially designed for interactive web servers; DataMapper to store and manipulate data on the server. There will also be a basic introduction to JavaScript, a tool for making web pages more interactive.
Announcements
November 23rd, 2011 Check the schedule for an additional extra credit assignment for Week 3.
November 7th, 2011 Our first session will take place in Room 15. After this week we'll move back to Room 20.
December 9, 2011 Our class today (Friday) will be held in Room 20. See you at 3:30