Computer Fundamentals

Computer Fundamentals
Understanding Web Development

I have taught web development in various forms over the past many years. This website contains information from courses that I taught including my notes, transcripts, insights, and other material. It has been edited to make sure that it is readable, but all of the content is derived from my own course content. Courses include CMU 95-881 Web Application Development, CMU 95-882 Enterprise Web Development, Pitt CS/CoE 1520 Computer Languages for Web Development, Pitt CS 134 Web Site Design and Development, and IUP COSC 415 Internet Architectures. Comments have been turned off, but you can feel free to contact me personally.

There is nothing special about the posts on the front page, as it is simply whatever Wordpress wants, which is typically the most recent items that I’ve uploaded.

  • Web 3.5 Personalization

    We can do much better. The last major piece for us is personalization. This is where I always like to use the example of, “I’ve been a customer since 1998, and I get the exact same interface as everybody else.” I’ve been using it for 20 years—why is it still the same thing? Why doesn’t…

  • Responsive Screen

    When we move on to a lot of the other technologies, and the other programming that we have to do is that there is the mobile web, it’s a device interface. We will adapt to different kinds of screen sizes, and there’s different kinds of programming that we do to be able to embrace the…

  • Mobile Apps

    Now we also have mobile applications as front‑end applications—sorry, mobile apps. A lot of the apps you use are really just written in JavaScript as regular websites. They simply hide all of the browser‑related stuff, so it doesn’t feel like a website, even though under the hood it basically is.