Software Engineering for Internet Applications (6.171) part of Teaching by Philip Greenspun

• concurrency -- 1000 people might be using the system at the same time
• unpredictable load -- 100,000 users might show up tomorrow even if only 100 are using the system today
• security risks -- an Internet application is forced to expose itself to attacks
• opportunity for wide-area distributed computing, i.e., using "Web services" provided by other machines on the Internet
• creating a reliable and stateful user experience on top of unreliable connections and stateless protocols
• extreme requirements and absurd development schedules
• requirements that change mid-way through a project, sometimes because of experience gained from testing with users
• user demands for a multi-modal interface: Web, mobile (WAP), and voice

This is a laboratory course where most of the learning occurs during the completion of problem sets. Students organize into groups of 2-4 for the purpose of building an online learning community. Each problem set is devoted to adding features and capabilities to the online community. We encourage students to work with a real customer or client. Good sources of clients for online communities include organizations that want knowledge sharing systems (intranets) and non-profit organizations that wish to operate a public online learning community within their area of expertise. Students who themselves have a passion for a particular topic sometimes build an online community in that area.

Practical Stuff

Regardless of programming tools chosen, every student in 6.171 will get experience with Internet standards such as HTTP, HTML, WAP, WML, and VoiceXML. Every student will learn how to use the RDBMS and SQL programming language. Every student will learn how to build distributed computing systems with standards such as SOAP and WSDL.

Prerequisites

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.

Basic Course Structure

• Lectures: 2 hours per week
• Public Site/Code Review: 1 hour per week
• Supervised/Cooperative Lab: 6 hours per week

Problem Sets

Basics: more or less the old pset 1 but remove references to specific
technologies and put those into a supplement.  On MIT calendar: 1.5
weeks.

Global Competitive Analysis: write down some usage scenarios and work
through them on some other sites on the Internet that have similar
objectives.  On MIT calendar:  0.5 weeks.

User registration and management.  Support grouping of users.  Include
the issue of whether or not to implement a party system.  On MIT
calendar: 1 week.

Content management.  Need to capture authorship, approval, moderation,
reference ("X is a comment on Y" or "A is a reponse to B").  On MIT
calendar: 2 weeks.

Software Modularity.  Need a way to group all the code for a module,
record the docs, publish APIs to other parts of the system, read
configuration parameters.  On MIT calendar: 1 week.

Discussion.  The most basic Web service, built on top of the content
management system.  Support categorization, moderation, breakout and
reassemble.  Include a user test.  On MIT calendar: 2 weeks.

WAP and voice interfaces.  Build a WAP interface that lets someone on
a mobile phone participate in the community.  Build a voice interface
that lets someone on a regular phone participate in the community.  In
2001 this will most likely use VoiceXML and the tellme.com
infrastructure, though it would be nice to use a more sophisticated
conversational system such as LCS JUPITER. On MIT calendar: 1 week.

Distributed Computing.  The world of Web services.  Introduces standards
such as SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI.  On MIT calendar: 1 week.

Scaling gracefully.  Geospatialization.  An "interesting person"
system.  On MIT calendar: 1 week.

Full-text search.  On MIT calendar: 1 week.

Personalization.  Users picking subject areas of interest,
categorization of content.  Then getting more advanced with full-text
comparison tools to measure similarity and dissimilarity to items
previously marked by a user as good or bad.  On MIT calendar: 1 week.

Goodbye to all that (manual coding).  Autogeneration of data model and
user experience scripts.  Either building a structured knowledge
management system within the subject area of the site (a la problem
set 4) or finding some similar challenge that is idiosyncratic to the
service being developed.  On MIT calendar: 1 week (make it a bit
easier than the old pset 4).

Writeup.  A final overview paper with screen shots illustrating the
most important aspects of the Web service built.  Designed to be no
more than 5 pages; one continuous Web document that can be entirely
consumed by scrolling.  

Exams

Textbooks

• Internet Application Workbook
• SQL for Web Nerds

We also recommend Visual Explanations : Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (Edward Tufte 1997; Graphics Press).

Adoption by Universities and Companies

• textbooks
• problem sets (incorporated in main text)
• lecture notes
• sample exams (on request)

Course History

• Fall 2003: offered as MIT course 6.171
• Spring 2002: offered as MIT course 6.171
• Spring 1999: offered as MIT course 6.916: Software Engineering of Innovative Web Services (3-0-9).
• Summer 1999: offered as an intensive summer course at University of Hamburg and New York University, as a 5-week boot camp (three psets plus Unix sysadmin and Oracle dbadmin), and as a 2-week boot camp (psets 1 and 2)
• Fall 1999: adopted by California Institute of Technology; offered again as MIT course 6.916
• Winter 2000: offered as an intensive 9-unit course during MIT's IAP;
• Spring 2000: repeated as MIT course 6.916, offered to remote students at UC Berkeley (thanks to Doug Tygar (tygar@cs.berkeley.edu) and Stanford University (thanks to Jeff Ullman, ullman@db.stanford.edu)
• Spring/Summer 2000: offered as CS190 at UCLA, taught by Robert Dennis (buddy@ucla.edu)
• Summer 2000: adopted by University of Michigan, taught by Nandit Soparkar
• June-December 2000: adopted by UFM (Guatemala City, Guatemala), taught by Oscar Bonilla
• Spring 2001: offered at Carnegie-Mellon, University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia; led by John Shepherd)
• May 2001: "Teaching Software Engineering" paper presented at the Web conference in Hong Kong, describing our experience with the course and the rationale behind the new curriculum and textbook
• Spring 2002: the revamped version offered at MIT as 6.171

Ancient History: if you came here looking for links to the old problem sets and texts, please visit http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/old-one-term-web-6916.

Ongoing Glory

from Spring 1999

• http://www.photo.net/gallery/ is another example of a site developed in Spring 1999 by a student team that continues to run on the public Internet. It was extended by Jesse Koontz and is now maintained by the photo.net team. The system permits the 105,000 registered users of photo.net (August 2001) to share and comment on uploaded photographs.

  from Fall 1999

• http://www.camfieldestates.net/ continues to serve the residents of a public housing project in inner-city Boston (see http://www.media.mit.edu/~rpinkett/papers/camfield-mit.html for background on this project by Randal D. Pinkett, a Media Lab graduate student

  from Fall 2000

• MIT UPV is online and providing an international cultural exchange for hundreds of students at MIT and Valencia, as described in this WIRED magazine article.