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Web Development Curriculum Ideas

Web Professionals Learning Directions

Here are some notes collecting the thoughts I've had since talking with Tiffany Burton from WSU Vancouver.

I reviewed the current curriculum, and took into account the discussion we had touching on students comments and wishes.

Let's analyze the possible curiculum directions by reviewing the needs of the web site development community.

World Wide Web site management falls across a very broad spectrum of sites. Everything from content focused sites in a magazine or newspaper model to those that are as complex as any large scale application in the case of services and e-commerce sites. This spectrum encompasses a variety of roles and professional needs within the organizations that host those sites.

Web site professionals range from what I'll term the graphics extreme to the development extreme. The graphics design professional who would be equally at home producing magazine and advertising images and layouts. The software development professional may have just completed a fully blown windows or macintosh client application or done enterprise scale database application development.

A web design curriculum should try to provide students with an introduction to that community to whatever depth they wish along whichever concentration they wish. They should be introduced precisely as they are in the current curriculum, i.e. html page creation, graphics optimization and so on. This introduction should provide some discussion of the kinds of work done in web development groups, content management site automation, etc.

From there I'd recommend two tracks, one we can call "Layout and Design" and one that could be called Server Scripting, Web Software Development or simply Web Development.

I'd suggest that the Web Development track start with an introduction that describes the various technologies available to provide automation to web servers. Call it a tools survey of sorts. We'd start by showing what kinds of things automation can help, everything from database updates, dynamic content for newspapers (i.e. Assoc. Press) and e-commerce automation. Then review the range of tools used to provide this automation. Some obvious ones to hit: Cold Fusion, Active Server Pages, Java and Java Servlets, Perl, Python and Php3. In discussing these, review the issues surrounding choices between Common Gateway Interface (CGI) versus tools that provide greater integration with the web server.

Many issues, often outside the developers control, can control which tools are used to automate web server activity. Often the web server will be hosted remotely, via some domain hosting service. The hosting site will then determine what tools are made available. At times a web server hosted within a company will have constraints placed on it, from political concerns on through to simply continuing to use tools that are familiar. All of this advocates for introducing a web developer to a host of technologies.

Some Thoughts About What Developers Need to Know

As a development director for an e-commerce web development company, I have some ideas about what a potential software developer should have in her toolkit when she comes to work.

[Initially this is in no order. I should arrange this in some scheme before distribution.]

Object Oriented Programming

Touching on Object Oriented Programming may seem too advanced for any but a computer science level class. I consider it to be actually more intuitive than some of the other, function-driven programming paradigms. I'd recommend pointing to the recent NSF Grant received by Guido Van Rossum at the CNRI for some discussion of these issues: http://www.python.org/doc/essays/everybody.html The piece is titled "Computer Programming for Everybody" Good piece.

Database Knowledge

Robust data storage is a common need in many web applications. For most of the web development tools this dictates one technology, SQL (Structured Query Language). Full database administration and management should likely be beyond the scope for this level class, but SQL Data Definition Language (DDL) should be touched on in addition to common database design considerations.