A note on browsers

You will need to use a web browser for viewing the course material and completing your exercises. Unfortunately, there is no current decent standards for web browser conformance to many of the technologies we will be studying. Therefore, I have selected

Firefox (this is available for download from Mozilla)

as the reference browser for this course. This browser is freely available for the most common platforms and provides good support for the web technologies we are interested in.

Please use Firefox for viewing the web-based material associated with this course.

port forwarding

Here is some information about

port forwarding that will come in useful if you want to develop servlets from outside the university.

Course Schedule

You are required to attend two lectures each week. Lectures begin in Week 1 of term and continue until Week 10 of term.

You are also required to attend one exercise class each week. Exercise classes begin in Week 2 of term and continue until Week 9.

Please consult your personal Sussex Direct timetable for the times and venues of the lectures and classes.

Course Notes

Course notes for this course will appear throughout the term. Please keep checking back at this website for details.

• Zero (25 Sep) Self-study HTML
• One (1st Oct) Introduction to XML
• Two(8th Oct) Cascading Style Sheets
• Three(15th Oct) Document Type Definitions
• Four(22nd Oct) DOM and Java
• Five(29th Oct) Scripting and HTTP
• Six(5th Nov) Servlets and JSP
• Seven, Eight(12th, 19th Nov) Client-side scripting
• Nine, Ten(16th Nov, 3rd Dec) Mock exam, Revision

Exercise sheets

Sheets for the weekly exercise classes will appear with the lecture notes - follow the links above.

Some of the labs assume some knowledge of linux/unix. A good place to start if this is new to you is here.

Objectives and Prerequisites

This course provides an introduction to the models and technologies used to provide services over the Internet and, in particular, the World Wide Web. Topics covered include: XML, including DTD, Schema, DOM, XPATH and XSLT, client-side programming (embedded scripting languages, style sheets), server-side programming (Java Servlets, JSP), and applications.

At the end of the course, successful students will be able to solve simple problems in the design of Internet services, using a variety of related technologies. They will use XML-derived markup languages such as XHTML, as XSLT, and use the Java XML API. They will be able to construct simple web-applications involving both client and server-side programming.

Java programming will be used throughout the course. Some knowledge of this language is assumed.

Syllabus

Introduction to XML, Stylesheets, DTD and Schema, DOM, XPATH, XSLT, Servlets, JSP, Javascript, XML applications.

Reading List

The subject of Internet Technologies is relatively new in Computer Science, and, as such, textbooks are not necessarily the best source of material. There are a number of excellent tutorial websites available to which I will offer links as appropriate. If you are keen to make use of a text book for reference then

Deitel, Deitel, Nieto, Lin and Sadhu

• XML How to program. Prentice Hall, 2001.

Online support for this book is available - click here. This book is also available from Amazon.

is a reasonable choice as it covers much of the material that we will be discussing on this course. This is not an essential purchase, but could be useful to you.