Engineering Internet Services part of Teaching by Philip Greenspun

This is a course for professional programmers and computer science students. A chief technology officer at a Web publisher might also find it useful even if he or she didn't have a strong programming background. Check my home page to see if this course is scheduled any time soon.

10:00 am to 11:30 am -- concurrency control and transactions

What makes engineering an Internet service fundamentally different from engineering a desktop application? First, concurrency. One thousand users may visit your service at the same instant; with a desktop app your program deals with one user at a time. Second, transactions become critical. Your connection to the user may become interrupted at any moment.

This portion of the course discusses the usage of standard relational database management systems (RDBMS) to manage concurrency and transactions.

• How to understand the RDBMS.
• Three slides that will teach everyone the entire SQL programming language.
• Why so many Web services use the Oracle RDBMS.
• Under the Oracle hood.
• The most interesting current Oracle features for Internet service developers
• The future of the RDBMS (beyond Oracle), including management of external data (SQL MED)

  11:45 pm to 12:30 pm -- Serving HTML, WAP, and VoiceXML pages from the database

  
• What must you have in a programming environment to ensure rapid development?
• What must you have in a programming environment to ensure a secure service?
• Keeping it running reliably: http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/arsdigita-server-architecture
• If you've got more than one person on the project, how do you extend the software reliably? (hint: http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/cvs)

  12:30 pm to 1:30 pm -- lunch

  
  

  1:30 pm to 2:15 pm -- New opportunities for software engineering professionalism

• http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism
  

  2:15 -- 2:45 pm -- Thinking Seriously about Usability

  
• How to get good ideas from users.
• Screen space.
• Time.
• Applying Experimental Psychology.
• Words.
• Color (and Britney Spears).
• Navigation
• Multidimensional programming.
• Bottom line.

  2:45 to 3:00 pm --soda break

  3:00 to 4:00 pm -- moving from OLTP to DSS to OLAP (data warehousing)

• What do all these acronyms actually mean?
• How to build a data warehouse.
• Revolutionizing Internet user activity analysis using standard dimensional data warehousing methods.

  4:00 to 5:00 pm -- powerful ideas from the ArsDigita Community System

• product engineers should also be publishers and users -- remember that programmers always build things to make their personal life easier (tech implication: scripting languages, break one page at a time)
• one url = one file
• pre-integration of applications, starting with one users table (or gateway to an LDAP server)
• low barrier to adoption (any Oracle programmer could use it, even if he or she did not understand the Web)
• open-source
• open-source tutorial materials
• well-defined path from programmer to toolkit programmer
• seamless email integration, e.g., in ticket tracker and bboard
• content repository
• database independence via named queries and query rewriting; using the URL as part of the key
• multilingual support via named English strings in the source code and string rewriting from a database; using the URL as part of the key
• abstract URLs (no .html or .whatever extensions)
• pervasive personalization
• high-volume sites can be heavily personalized using raw Oracle queries; 500,000 hits/day per 400 MHz CPU (iff you don't use too many layers and too many tiers)

• More Details: see the slides

• Background reading:
  • http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/
  • http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/