Time: 6:00-9:00 MW,
Room: Moore 100B
URL: http://alliance.seas.upenn.edu/~matuszek/wiki/wiki700/index.php

Course Summary:

Web technologies evolve rapidly. The goal of this course is to present some of the current "hot" Web topics. There will be two main foci of the current course: Ruby (including Rails), and Web Services (including Ajax).

Ruby is a relatively new, fully object oriented, open source programming language that runs on all major platforms. It has many unusual features (such as continuations) that distinguish it from more conventional O-O languages such as Java and C++. Ruby is rapidly gaining in popularity due to a "killer app," Ruby on Rails, which promises to greatly simplify the creation of commercial Web sites.

Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) is a combination of technologies that employs the use of Javascript locally in a browser to communicate asyncronously with the server, avoiding postback flashing and delays and significantly improving response times for Web-based programs. The success of Google Earth and similar applications has brought Ajax into the limelight.

Class format: Part lecture and part hands-on programming and experimentation.

Prerequisite: Basic knowledge of object-oriented programming.