Web Development Home
CS U675 & CS G175
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/teaching/web/
Overview: Web Development
The history of web development started with the deployment of static HTML
web pages and evolved to include the following techniques:
- Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading style sheets or CCS have become a key to separating the
styles, spacing, and location of elements of web content from
the specification of that content in HTML files.
- Server-Side Tools for Dynamic Web Pages
Microsoft ASP.NET is an example of a family of server-side tools to
dynamically generate rich web pages that can change structure and
enable data interactions based both on conditions at the time the
page is served and on interactions from the end user. Moreover,
page data content need not be provided statically but rather can
be retrieved and manipulated using back-end data sources.
The main limitation of server-side techniques is that the web page
must do a full refresh each time a change is required.
- Client-Side Tools for Dynamic Web Pages
Javascript is a scripting language that is built into modern browsers,
albeit with some differences of implementation that require workarounds.
Javascript is capable of modifying the visual structure of a document
by modifying the CCS styles of a document element or by adding/removing
document elements. These changes can be initiated by a user and can
take place without intervention of the server.
Javascript can also initiate communication with the server, send and
receive data, and use the received data to modify a web page without
the need for a full page refresh. This technique is known as AJAX.
- Server-Side Tools for Creating the Client-Side Tools
A recent technique in web development is to use server-side tools to
generate some of the client-side Javascipt so that Javascript itself
becomes dynamic rather than being coded by hand manually.
- Web Services
A big question in web development is how to enable programs to communicate
over the web. Should the information transmitted be lightweight and be
packed in human-readable text format or should the information be packaged
as XML for processing by standard tools? How should security requirements
be met expecially when encryption is needed? These are the questions of
the field of web services.
- Plug-Ins That Add Functionality to a Browser
Javascript in a browser is sufficient for many tasks but is ultimately
limited because it is an interpreted and dynamic language that must
traverse its structures each time it is used. To get around this,
plug-ins such as Flash and Silverlight compile scripts for dramatic
performance gains.
The purpose of the Web Development course is to explore these themes through discussion
in class and, more importantly, through projects. See the page on
Requirementsand Expectations
for more details on the philosophy of the course.
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