... Advanced Web Programming ...

C1. Overview

Course objective
The main objective of the Advanced Web Programming course is to discuss state of the art technologies in Web Programming and some open research issues of the domain. For now, they are known as Web 2.0. It represents the next generation of Internet applications, business strategy and technologies that supports contribution to the online community.

Internet. Short History
Internet is the name of a global network based on several standardized protocols. Most of them were adopted in early ‘90 (TCP-IP, FTP, HTTP …). The Internet Protocol Suite resulted from research and development conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The TCP/IP model consists of four layers described by RFC 1122. These are the Link Layer, the Internet Layer, the Transport Layer, and the Application Layer.
In March 1982, the US Department of Defense declared TCP/IP as the standard for all military computer networking. In 1985, the Internet Architecture Board held a three-day workshop on TCP/IP for the computer industry, attended by 250 vendor representatives, promoting the protocol and leading to its increasing commercial use. However, the Internet started to have a significant cultural and commercial impact since 1990.
For more information about history please consult The Internet page.

Web technologies
In the 1980's, the World Wide Web term was invented by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau in Europe (during some sessions in the CERN cafeteria), and then rapidly spread around the world over the Internet in the 1990's by Marc Andreessen and the NCSA team that developed the Mosaic and Netscape browsers. For his work in developing the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee received the Millennium technology prize in 2004.
In 1994, the W3 Consortium was formally established with support from the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) Fr, DARPA, and the European Commission, with a mandate to oversee development of common web protocols and promote web interoperability.
Nowadays Web 2.0 represents a big step from the first generation of websites. They were typically produced and updated by independent webmasters. For the rest of the community this means "read only" content. Any case, this was a big step from paper, but nowadays it is a huge demand for interactions between the Web and the "community knowledge". The way this interaction was added can be summarized as the new "server side" and client side" technologies. Most of these are represented by open-source or free software, as web server and web development languages and tools. Free technologies like Apache, PHP, Perl or MySQL enabled rapid development of dynamic low cost Web applications.
Interaction is the key of Web 2.0. For business applications, the Web customers are creators of so-called "user-generated content". They add comments and evaluations; they build new web pages; they upload audio, video and images. In few words, they provide other users with useful information. The need of responsive applications was solved through new technologies (ex. Ajax).
Users can contribute by participating through blogs, podcasts, and online profiles. They even can communicate directly through online conference services like Skype. These where made possible when the broadband Internet connections becomes reality. Indeed, Web services centered on audio and video distribution simply could not exist without high-speed Internet and inexpensive bandwidth costs.

Other research topics

  • Social Web (web 2.0) -> Semantic Web (3.0)
    Semantic Web is a group of methods and technologies to allow machines to understand the meaning - or "semantics" - of information on the World Wide Web (Wikipedia).
    • Semantic Web Data and Ontologies
    • Applications interoperability on the Semantic Web
    • Semantic Web Services
    • Data mining on the Semantic Web
    • Semantic Web performance and scalability issues
  • New and more powerful standards
    • Resource Description Framework (RDF)
    • Agents Description Language (ex DARPA DAML)
    • Tools to query information (ex. SPARQL)
  • Multimedia languages (ex. SMIL)
  • Learning environments (ex. Moodle)

Slides:
C1. Overview.

Additional Readings:
Ben Parr, "What the Web of Tomorrow Will Look Like: 4 Big Trends to Watch", 2010