Off route 143 in Gotland.  Sweden.

Software Engineering for Web Applications (6.916)

part of Teaching by Philip Greenspun

The Strip.  Las Vegas, Nevada. This course gives students the following skills: Consider the plight of a student who wants to learn how to build a Web application. Web apps rely on multiple technology layers working reliably together 24x7. To be successful, a student will need to learn a bit about Unix, a bit about a relational database management system, a lot about engineering the Web server object itself, proficiency in some scripting language, the basics of HTTP, a bit about administering permissions and configuration of a Web server, the syntax of HTML, etc.

At most colleges today, there is no way to learn all of these skills via the current curriculum. Even at schools where there are a lot of practical classes, the student would have to sit through three semesters before being able to serve a single page: Unix, C/C++, database, relational database management systems and SQL, object-oriented design, networking protocols, Internet protocols.

This course gives a student everything that he or she really needs to know. Some of the stuff is deep. For example, a Web server is an object. It has internal state, whose persistence is typically achieved via a relational database management system (e.g., Oracle). The methods are the URLs and the arguments to those methods are the form variables on the pages that target those URLs. Engineer will have to design future Web services so that their methods can be invoked by other services across the public Internet. Some of the stuff is shallow. The student needs to learn how to use Emacs, that typing "sqlplus" into the Unix shell is a way to connect to Oracle, that HTTP mandates headers separated by CRLF, then two CRLFs, then the page content.

By the end of this 13-week course at MIT, all of the students have built Web applications that compete with the best commercial Web services (but without the ugly banner ads). See arfdigita.org for an example.

Isn't this too much practical stuff?

Some CS faculty have looked at this course and said "We love the deep concepts and the high-level stuff but we shouldn't have to teach students how to use Oracle or any other real system." People think this course is too practical or just right depending on their conception of what happens when a student graduates.

In the Good Old Days our students would graduate and go to work for a large company where they would be a junior programmer. They'd spend five years learning to become an engineer from the experienced folks in their large organization. At age 28, they would begin to take on the role of senior developer or system architect. In the current world, however, a top MIT CS graduate will go right into a venture capital-backed .com startup as the Chief Technology Officer or senior developer. Our graduate will have to translate business requirements into technology decisions and won't be able to ask advice from more experienced people in their organization.

So the question is "Do we want to give MIT master's degrees in computer science, from the School of Engineering, to people who do not have the foggiest idea of how to engineer the kind of information systems that society wishes to build?" My answer is "No!" and "Here's a course that will at least familiarize students with the major challenges that they'll confront in the next 20 years of their careers and some ideas and technology that can be applied to meeting those challenges."

Prerequisites

Joy of Coffee.  Temple Bar. Dublin, Ireland. This is a senior-level class at MIT where we expect the average student to be working on a bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, to have taken our introduction to computer science (6.001), to have taken our core software engineering class (6.170), and to have done at least some programming during summer jobs.

That said, the class does not require any knowledge of particular computer languages or systems. I.e., the students will learn enough about the required tools as the course progresses.

Adoption by Universities and Companies

Entrance to University of California, Berkeley campus. This course is designed for easy adoption by other universities. We provide the following materials online for free: You will need to set up a Unix/Oracle server on which your students can work. Linux is fine (though at MIT we use Solaris). A single pizza-box Unix machine ($7000) or modern Pentium supports 30 students nicely if you have at least 512 MB of RAM. If your school isn't already site-licensed for Oracle, you can usually get a free or good deal from the Oracle folks (they like to support teaching of Oracle skills in universities).

Course History

This course was developed by Hal Abelson (hal@mit.edu), Michael Dertouzos (mld@lcs.mit.edu), and Philip Greenspun (philg@mit.edu). Bottom line: about 500 CS majors have gone through this curriculum and all but about 15 have become competent database-backed Web service developers.

Basic Course Structure

Cooling water flowing out of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant and back into the Connecticut River.  These concrete structures are designed to aerate the water and make it more useful to the life of the river.  Vernon, Vermont. You will want a laboratory where all the students can work together, one terminal per student. The terminal should be capable of running ssh (to connect to the development), an X server (for convenience in using Emacs), and a Web browser such as Netscape Navigator. At MIT, we use an Athena classroom or cluster where each terminal is a Unix machine. Linux is fine and Macintosh or Wintel PCs are also fine if you install a bit of extra software.

For the lectures, you'll want a room with a good Internet connection and video projector so that all the students can see one Web browser.

Most of the work and learning happens during the problem sets. Ideally, the teaching assistants should be experienced software developers, e.g., volunteers from industry. The TAs and students sit side-by-side at a terminal and discuss approaches to a problem. This is the only way that we know of to teach students to build tasteful maintainable code.

Options

Bellagio Casino.  The Strip Las Vegas. If you have advanced students and a lot of TA resources, try to get through the problem sets early in the semester and then let students build projects in teams of two or three. We did this at MIT the first time that we taught 6.916. It worked pretty well except that the students weren't educated to a very uniform standard. The ones who were strong programmers coming in were strong programmers going out; weak programmers only got a bit better. The students who worked on good project ideas with helpful clients did great work and learned a lot; students saddled with weak project ideas or indifferent clients were frustrated and didn't get much out of the project.

Here are some options:

Materials


philg@mit.edu
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