What would you teach if WEB were launched in 2010? [closed]

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I will be hosting weekly a couple hours session at university aimed at teaching some of our better students web-programming. These people are pretty proficient at computers and some are good at web.

What web-techno开发者_高级运维logies would you teach in 2010 for a semi-advanced students team?

What would you include?

And what would you omit to teach? (important)

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XHTML, CSS and a good javascript framework such as jQuery.

May seem simple, but knowing how to create standards-compliant xhtml, efficient and clean CSS, and good javascript is something most people skim over. But, without them, your website will tend to be crappy and hard to maintain.

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The web is stateless and the browser isn't part of your app.

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How to extract and put data into a database through a web site. Basic SQL querying including most especially a knowledge of joins. Many web developers seem to have serious knowldge gaps when it comes to databases and most web sites in some way need to access the database.

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If you're trying to teach them web development, there are far too many technologies to concentrate on. Instead, I would give them an 'under-the-hood' view of how the Web works. That way, when they encounter any technology, they'll understand what's actually happening and will adopt them much faster than by being 'trained' in one technology or another. I have taught a Web systems course for some years now, and the results (student feedback, sometimes even years later) have been very positive.

I taught them how to write a web server in Java. It sounds simple, even counterintuitive, to do this. However, by allowing them to see for themselves how HTTP works, you can give them a more solid framework for learning specific technologies. I chose Java because it has the ServerSocket class - setting up a port listener is dead easy, so they don't have to have a background in networking in order to write one.

Once they have a simple server going, they can then add servlet handling, an XML config, https support... the sky's the limit.

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I would include HTML5, given the ostensible lack of support for flash in the mac products - this may be a sign that flash may not be the dominant multimedia presentation medium so I would avoid teaching flash.

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Expose them to a variety of browser technologies and the tools that aid in development. In each class you could briefly cover a different tech.

Some random ideas for a mock class - Javascript Day

• Show common, everyday, examples on sites such as fb/youtube
• Demo some exceptional JS apps / games that highlight the flexibility of the language & the scope of the type of apps/scripts
• Show some simple code examples
• Introduce jQuery, Prototype, and other frameworks, that make life better.

You probably shouldn't get too technical or scare off future developers.

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I'd consider going over some of the basic RIA architectures like Silverlight/WPF, Flash, and JavaFX for one idea of what can be done within a browser.

At the same time, I'd be tempted to flip that by looking at off-line things like .Net and AIR that may become more common in the future within apps that need web connectivity but run outside the browser,e.g. Twhirl that uses AIR but does connect over the web to pull down web content.