Advanced Web Technologies (CIS-2450) Home Page

This is the home page for Peter Chapin's Advanced Web Technologies course notes for the Fall 2024 semester. Here you will find electronic versions of class handouts, homework assignments, lecture slides, and links to other references of interest. If you are a student taking Advanced Web Technologies, consider bookmarking this page.

The homework submission area and grade book are on Canvas, but all other course resources are here.
The course syllabus gives an overview of the course and its content, lists course resources, and describes the grading policy and related issues.
For this course, it is necessary that you have access to a webserver where you can put your pages and other back-end programs. I recommend that you manually install Apache on your system for this purpose (rather than, for example, using XAMPP). I describe the procedure in the first part of my Windows Web Development notes (for Mac users, consult my macOS Web Development notes).
For a development environment, I recommend either Visual Studio Code or WebStorm, an integrated development environment (IDE) for doing web development by JetBrains.
I've prepared some general information on submitting assignments.
My home page contains other resources of potential interest.

Topics

The lectures and the labs for this course are taught in face-to-face+ format. This means there are in-person times scheduled, but the course will also be accessible via Zoom at the same time.

2024-08-26. Introduction to the course. Overview of Lab #1 and the development environment(s) I recommend.
2024-08-28. No class.
2024-09-02. No class (vacation).
2024-09-06. Introduced Lab #2. Introduced Node, Sass, and Bootstrap.
2024-09-09. Discussed web development workflows and introduced the Waterfalls of the New England Region website that we will use as sample.
2024-09-13. More on Bootstrap.
2024-09-16. Discussed web browser options and introduced JavaScript.
2024-09-20. More on JavaScript. Introduced Lab #3.
2024-09-23. Discussed the history of XML/XHTML/HTML.
2024-09-27. Discussed HTML Inclusions.
2024-09-30. Introduced the HTML Document Object Model.
2024-10-04. No class.
2024-10-07. No class (Vacation).
2024-10-11. No class (Vacation).

Slides

Lab Assignments

The lab set is summarized in the lab summary document, along with links to specific lab handouts and supporting code samples.

Samples

A JavaScript number guessing game on the Mozilla Developers Network

Resources/Articles

Base HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (ECMAScript)

Mozilla has some nice (and relatively approachable) documentation about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
The HTML Living Standard as defined by WHATWG is the most current and most authoritative definition of HTML. Note that WHATWG took over the evolution of HTML from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in May 2019. Although the W3C is still involved in the development of HTML, it no longer defines the standard.
The W3C still controls the CSS standard (as far as I can see).
The official ECMAScript standard from 2022 (13^th edition)
The W3C's Amaya browser is a technology demonstration and web browsing/editing tool. Development on it seems to have stopped around 2012, so it is a bit out-of-date, but it is still an interesting concept-browser.
Ryan's Tutorials have a much more digestible presentation of HTML and related topics.

Technologies

The Dart programming language. Google maintains Dart. Its target application area is web development.
Node.js is an implementation of JavaScript that runs outside the web browser.
The Chocolatey package manager for Windows. The Homebrew package manager for macOS.
Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets is a CSS preprocessor that compiles *.sass files to CSS.
Bootstrap is a CSS/JavaScript library of useful components that makes creating attractive, functional webpages easier.
Introduction to the DOM.

Apache

The main Apache documentation site.