CIS 455 / 555: Internet and Web Systems (Spring 2011)

Alex Lee, leea@seas.upenn.edu
Office hour: Wednesdays 4:30-5:30pm (Levine 612)

Zhongxin Ma, maz@seas.upenn.edu
Office hour: Thursdays 1:30-2:30pm (Levine 612)

We will examine how XML standards enable information exchange; how web services support cross-platform interoperability (and what their limitations are); how "cloud computing" services work; how to do replication and Akamai-like content distribution; and how application servers provide transaction support in distributed environments. We will study techniques for locating machines, resources, and data (including directory systems, information retrieval indexing and ranking, web search, and publish/subscribe systems); we will discuss collaborative filtering and mining the Web for patterns; we will investigate how different architectures support scalability (and the issues they face). We will also examine the ideas that have been proposed for tomorrow's Web, including the "Semantic Web", and see some of the challenges, research directions, and potential pitfalls.

An important goal of the course is not simply to discuss issues and solutions, but to provide hands-on experience with a substantial implementation project. This semester's project will be a peer-to-peer implementation of a Googe-style search engine, including distributed, scalable crawling; indexing with ranking; and even PageRank. We will also incorporate the use of topic-specific recognizers and mash-ups.

As a side effect of the material of this course, you will learn about some aspects of large-scale software development: assimilating large APIs, thinking about modularity, reading other people's code, managing versions, debugging, and so on.