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.

  • Basic Web Interaction

    The basic web interaction is client–server. The server runs and waits—basically forever. Clients then connect to the server, and if they’re using HTTP, it’s one file at a time. I make a GET request, I get the file, and it’s stored in the cache. This part actually becomes important later on, because we’re going to…

  • URL

    The URL is really talking about the file—the file I actually want to transfer. So here’s an example URL. The http part is the protocol. How do we transfer the file? HTTP—Hypertext Transfer Protocol—basically means I open a connection to the server, ask for a file, get the file, and then close the connection. If…

  • Web Browser

    The browser is just a software application. In the client–server model, your computer is the client. It’s where things originally land, where they’re actually stored. The reason I like talking about the web at this point is that it’s really all about the underlying technology of moving files around. Basically: here’s my URL, I want…