Educational Objectives and Approach to Learning
Dr. Daniel Andresen, 12/21/2001

The objectives of this course are:

1. to learn fundamentals of designing and implementing advanced web-based distributed systems. These include
• user interface issues and design,
• basic distributed computing issues, such as scalability, reliability, and performance,
• methodologies for site designs and architectures, and
• familiarities with popular tools and techniques for web-site implementation
2. to give students the opportunity to practice these skills on real-world types of applications which they can be expected to program in research, education, business, and industry environments.

The approach to learning in this class is:

1. a traditional lecture with all lecture notes and projects available to the students on "the web" and accessible through a browser
2. challenging group programming assignments which promote "active learning" to reinforce and amplify the lecture material. These assignments will include significant implementations in an actual, working web-based system to familiarize students with the internals of site  implementations.

The success of meeting these objectives will be assessed through:

1. exams covering the course material
2. grades on the team programming projects
3. in-class interaction, including quizzes and questions during lecture

Prior to entering this class, students are expected to be:

1. familiar with basic concepts from operating systems and networking, including threads, the memory hierarchy, TCP/IP, and sockets.
2. experienced with the C  programming languages, including header files, the preprocessor, pointers, arrays, structures, and memory management
3. experienced with object-oriented program design and the Java programming language, including the concepts of threads, data hiding, and interfaces
4. familiar with how the computer hardware is structured, including the memory hierarchy, basic I/O interfaces, interrupts, the purpose of the CPU
5. experienced with basic networking, including sockets and RPC/RMI communications.