One-day Internet Applications Course part of Teaching by Philip Greenspun

This is an updated version of a course that we've taught about twenty times (at Berkeley, MIT, NYU, Stanford, and Caltech). People at all levels of nerdiness seem to like it. Decision makers get the big picture. Professional programmers learn what's important about Internet applications. Check my home page periodically to see if any classes are scheduled.

What You'll Learn

• ability to distinguish between good and bad Internet service ideas -- predicting stickiness
• ability to select the appropriate tools and people to realize your service goals
• how to build a common Internet service that is accessible from Web browsers, mobile phones (WAP and iMode), Internet appliances, and other Web services
• a bit about voice interfaces to information systems, including an introduction to the VoiceXML standard
• what is interesting from a service operator's and end-user's perspective about systems and standards such as XML, SOAP, Microsoft .NET, J2EE
• the six required elements for a successful public online community
• four optional elements for online community derived from sociology research

How You'll Learn It

9:00 -- 10:00 am -- informal gathering for coffee

10:00 am -- 12:30 pm -- morning session

• The power of user-centric organization of Web and WAP services
• Building a service that collects and redistributes multiple perspectives: identifying the elements of collaboration
• Implications of replacing desktop applications with Internet services
• Organizing and coordinating a team to build a site--if tools get better every year, how come the average site keeps getting worse?
• HTML, page design, interaction design (page-to-page flow), XML, VoiceXML, implications of the GPRS mobile data infrastructure
• Content Management

  12:30 pm to 1:30 pm -- we break for lunch

  1:30 pm to 4:30 pm -- afternoon session

• Software engineering for Web applications; why data model and page flow are the heart of any system and why the RDBMS (Oracle) has become central to modern Web systems
• SQL: data modeling and JOINs
• What's interesting about ecommerce:
  • social shopping -- would you shop in a store where nobody else shops?
  • lifetime customer value management
  • 1:1 marketing for real
• The common challenge in most Internet and Intranet applications: making the online community component work
• An integrated open-source approach to building online communities.
• Themes for the future:
  • collaboration technology will change organizations
  • computers talking to each other
  • do you want to interact with 100 different electronic personalities?

  4:30 -- 5:00 pm -- wrap up with informal question and answer

• More Details: see the slides

• More Detail: Oftentimes, a day or two after I give this class, I'll also give a one-day tools course geared at teaching technology people how to build services.