Syllabus

Design and Development of Web and Mobile Applications

(Especially for Start Ups)

Spring 20121

Stern School of Business

Norman White, KMEC 8-88

Email: nwhite@stern.nyu.edu

Phone: 212 - 998 0842

TA: TBA

Development of Web and Mobile Applications

The internet has become the most common way to distribute applications to end users, whether they are web based applications, or mobile device based applications.

This course covers application development, from a web page to a web site, including mobile applications. Students will have access to a cloud environment in which to experiment with their ideas. Custom servers can be built for individual projects, depending on the needs of the project. Access to the cloud will remain available for 8 months after the course has officially ended, for those groups which are pursuing financing.

The course covers a wide variety of different internet development approaches and architectures.  Issues such as security, performance, scalability, and maintainability of the different approaches will be examined. Web/mobile enabling of applications will be discussed, and in particular techniques for developing web/mobile-enabled databases, which can be accessed from browsers running on PCs, or mobile applications running on iphones, Ipads, Androids, or similar devices.

There will be a cloud computing environment available so that student groups can implement their ideas on an appropriate platform. Supported platforms will include virtually anything that can run on the intel architecture, including Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows Server (including IIS, SQL Server etc.), and any flavors of linux. Students will have access to the Microsoft Developers Network software suite, as well as virtually all open source software packages such as apache, python, php, java, mysql, hadoop, etc.

Students should have the ability to build a simple web page and be proficient with common Microsoft office business applications, including ACCESS. There will be light programming used as examples of how to build dynamic web pages and mobile apps.

The special requirements of social media sites will be discussed, and the hadoop system and its related tools used as an example of how to handle Big Data with very large data sets.

Course Requirements: There will be several small homework assignments, an on-line quiz, a mid-term exam, and a final (group) project.

The group projects must be implemented in the Stern Sandbox cloud.

Grades will be based on homeworks (20%), Mid-term/Quizzes (30%), Final project (30%), and  class participation (20%). Please bring name tags to class.

Week	Topic(s)	Concepts/Activities	Readings
1	Introduction, course overview	Review of Client Server Computing model, review of web protocols, standards, what is an IT architecture?	See Web Outline
2	Web page development	HTML, Dreamweaver, Front Page,	See Web Outline
2	Common Gateway Interface (CGI) model	Examples, Overview of server side scripting languages, PERL, PHP, ASP How do we enable web and mobile users to run applications	See Web Outline
3	Cloud Computing	The advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing will be discussed, and a demonstration of the Stern Cloud will be given. Sample  servers will be built and deployed…. Students will access the demo servers using Remote Desktop or Xwindows clients	See Web Outline
4	Unix as a web platform	Advantages and disadvantages, popular platforms (Apache, Iplanet, Solaris, SGI, Linux), introduction to Unix tools and concepts (Shell language) Demo of a shell program as part of a web/mobile app	See Web Outline
4	Unix / Linux Application development approaches	Java Servlets, Java Server Pages, web services, application servers, fast CGI, mod Perl  etc. (possible speaker ).	See Web Outline
4	The Windows Server Platform	IIS overview - Active Server Pages, Front Page, How do we integrate other toolsets (PERL, PHP, Java etc.) Windows development tools, MSSQL, Visual Studio etc.; Overview of the Microsoft .NET initiative? (possible Microsoft speaker)	See Web Outline
5	Review of Relational Data Base concepts	E/R models, normalization, SQL, remote access client/server methods (ODBC, JDBC). How do we access data bases from the web and mobile devices?	See Web Outline
6	Mid-term Exam Discussion of projects
7, 8	Mobile Apps	What do we need to build mobile apps? Apple Iphone SDK, Android SDK Homework, build an APP for IPHONE or ANDROID	See Web Outline
9	Tools for building data driven  applications	ODBC, CGI, JDBC, XML, Java, ASP, Perl, PHP, Cold Fusion, SQL Server, Oracle 8i, MySQL How similar are the different systems?	See Web Outline
10	Big Data Solutions	Google file System, Map Reduce, Hadoop Demo Where does the data come from? Data requirements of Social Media sites.	See Web Outline
10	Map Reduce Programming	.Map Reduce, HBASE, HIVE, PIG  and other Big Data tools for managing petabytes of data
11	Course Review, Project discussions
12	Final Projects	Project Presentations with Food and Drink
13		Final Projects Due