Advanced Web Designs

Spring Term (05-2) Special Topics Course Offering

INFSCI 1090: Special Topics: Programming (36093)

INFSCI 2935: Special Topics: System Design (38254)

Instructor: Michael B. Spring

Class Time: Mondays, 6:00-9:00

Location: IS 404

These two courses will cover complimentary sides of advanced web design topics for graduate and undergraduate students. Students who wish to take the course should have experience with either Java or C++ programming. Students should also be minimally proficient with HTML and web design. Participants should have some experience with client and server side scripting languages for web systems.

While participants will be free to engage a number of different projects, the primary focus will be on using these advanced web designs to enhance the functionality of the RAPAI project. This will involve building RSS related systems, RFID related systems, LBS related systems, and advanced spiders and bots. The goal will be to engage a series of Phase 2 development activities for the RAPAI system – the embedded information system in the Lobby of the SIS building.

Graduate students will be responsible for design and programming of the systems. Undergraduate students will work with graduate students and will be focused primarily on programming activities. Beyond programming, undergraduates will also focus on unit and integration testing.

Work for the course will be done primarily in Java, but students will have the opportunity to work using a variety of advanced languages such as php, and XSLT. The course will take a close look at XML as a background markup language that may be converted via XSLT and other languages to HTML for display.

For more information on the RAPAI system, see http:/webdev.sis.pitt.edu/

The Textbook for the course is Processing XML with Java by Elliotte Rusty Harold, Addison Wesley, 2003.