Computer Fundamentals

Computer Fundamentals
Understanding Web Development

I have taught web development in various forms over the past many years. This website contains information from courses that I taught including my notes, transcripts, insights, and other material. It has been edited to make sure that it is readable, but all of the content is derived from my own course content. Courses include CMU 95-881 Web Application Development, CMU 95-882 Enterprise Web Development, Pitt CS/CoE 1520 Computer Languages for Web Development, Pitt CS 134 Web Site Design and Development, and IUP COSC 415 Internet Architectures. Comments have been turned off, but you can feel free to contact me personally.

There is nothing special about the posts on the front page, as it is simply whatever Wordpress wants, which is typically the most recent items that I’ve uploaded.

  • Web Products

    Okay, now let’s talk about web products—the actual products themselves. By the way, there isn’t a real, official taxonomy for this. This is something I had to develop over the course of several years, and honestly, a big part of that was just living through it. So let’s start with the basic question: what is…

  • Web 3.5

    For us, this is where Web 3.5 comes in. What we’re going to build are personalized websites. We’re going to explicitly incorporate personalization into the website itself. The best way to think about this is customization. We’re tailoring the site to the user, kind of like a suit. We start with a basic suit that’s…

  • Web 3.0

    Now we get to Web 3.0. These are semantically enriched websites. And no, this is not the “semantic web.” I always like to point out that I’ve been living through this for the past 30 years, and every year someone says, “Oh, this is the semantic web.” One day they’ll actually figure out what that…