Category:I702 Web Application Programming

Intro

This course is 5 ECTS and it's mandatory for CSE students. Other ITC students may also attend and CSE students who comprehend Estonian can follow the I244 lectures.

The main point of this course is to get to know the software stack that is used to build modern web applications and by the end of the course being able to write a web application and if we'll have enough time - to deploy it on a (virtual) server and defend it. Deduplicate your work and combine the work of this course with Python and Research Project courses.

• Progress visible in Git from day one
• Possible scenarios to pass the course:
  • classic: Build a simple mobile-frindly webshop with shopping cart using PHP, MySQL, Apache, Ubuntu.
  • Substitute a component (see below) you don't like and do the same
  • Scratch your own itch, develop something that largely makes use of following technologies and it is relevant to you
  • Extend WordPress, Joomla etc to build a website for your customer, eg. when you're working already
  • Pick a project idea from Python course page, there are several ideas which more or less constitute as web apps.
  • Find an interesting web application that's participating on Google Summer of Code, get to know the community, prepare for participation on GSoC and successfully finish the GSoC.
• If this is your first experience with this sort of stuff make sure you go HTML & CSS, JavaScript and jQuery tracks on CodeAcademy and start with simply creating your homepage :)

Requirements

Following are the requirements for the traditional+modern web application:

• Makes use of WebFonts
• Makes use of HTML5 input types
• Makes use of CSS3 styling
• Makes use of JavaScript additional user input validation.
• Makes use of server side programming language (eg PHP, node.js, Python, Ruby)
• Makes use of a database eg (MySQL, Postgres or NoSQL) in a safe manner, avoids SQL injections.
• Mobile friendly, same web application has to work comfortably on desktop, phones and tablets as well.
• Makes use of cookies for sessions.
• Conforms to standards, use W3C Validation Service to check.
• Can be used by visually impaired people, this usually means the web application has to be usable from a text-based web browser such as links, lynx or w3m.

Optional features

• Estonian ID-card login
• Social network login buttons
• Use nchan or node.js etc for implementing real-time communication between the server and web browser using EventSource or WebSockets.

Deployment

Traditional PHP+MySQL can be deployed on enos.itcollege.ee:

• if you're using Windows computers at school simply place the PHP files under H:\public_html
• if you're using Ubuntu computers at school simply place the PHP files under ~/Documents/public_html
• if you're using Windows remotely use PuTTY, WinSCP or Swish to connect to enos.itcollege.ee with your school credentials
• if you're using Ubuntu remotely, press Ctrl-L in file browser and enter sftp://user@enos.itcollege.ee/home/user/public_html

Otherwise you can use any Ubuntu/Debian based machine and simply do:

 sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysql

After that you can simply place files under /var/www/html and point your web browser to the IP address of the machine, which in case of your laptop is http://localhost

The easiest way to set up and manage a MySQL database is by installing phpMyAdmin:

 sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin mysql-server

Password for the root database user is asked, remember to save this for later! Open up http://localhost/phpmyadmin and log in with username root and the same password. Remember that MySQL root user is distinct from the operating system user root!

Katrin will show you how to install and manage Ubuntu in Operating systems course.