Introduction to Web Based Applications

Development
Lesson 1

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 Introduction to Web-Based Applications

The World Wide Web has a profound impact on our lives since the 1990s.

Some of the most successful companies that based their business on web technologies
e.g. Amazon, Yahoo and Google have become as well known as the most famous global
manufacturing and service companies of previous eras.

Technology is moving towards web-based applications that let us perform tasks such as
managing our money, booking travel and purchasing goods and services without having
to step away from the computer.

Just having a website is no longer enough, that site must support web applications.

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 Introduction to Web-Based Applications

What is a ‘Web-based application?’

By definition, it is something more than just a ‘Web site.’ It is

a client/server application that uses a Web browser as its
client program, and performs an interactive service by
connecting with servers over the Internet (or Intranet).

A Web site simply delivers content from static files. A

Web/Internet application presents dynamically tailored
content based on request parameters, tracked user
behaviors, and security considerations.
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 What a Web Application does

1. A web application enables us to distribute documents over the World Wide Web.

2. A web application manages concurrency, enabling access to a single web-based

resource by multiple users.

3. A web application can generate dynamic content, building web pages on the fly
from sources of data that may include data supplied by users.

4. A web application can include declaratives, role-based security, which enables you
to allow or deny to specific resources to users based on their user roles.

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 What a Web Application does

5. A web application provides facilities to connect to a database so that its content

can be kept in permanent storage, to be retrieved when required.

6. A web application utilises the transactional services of a database so that

updates to the content are reliable and consistent.

7. A web application leverages the services of its underlying hardware and

software infrastructure to run the same application across multiple machines,
enabling scalability.

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 Terminology

Internet

The Internet is a collection of computers around the world connected to

each other via a high-speed series of networks.

It can also be defined as a world-wide system of interconnected computers

cooperating with each other to exchange data using a common software
standard through telephone lines and satellite links.

All the computers in the Internet can communicate with each other using
a communication standard called HTTP.

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 Terminology

WWW (World Wide Web)

The official definition of the WWW is "wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative
aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents."
 wide-area: The World Wide Web spans the whole globe.
 hypermedia: It contains various types of media (text, pictures, sound, movies ...) and hyperlinks that
connect pages to one another.
 information retrieval: Viewing a WWW document (commonly called a Web page) is very easy thanks to
the help of Web browsers. They allow you to retrieve pages just by clicking links, or entering addresses.
 universal access: It doesn't matter what type of computer you have, or what type of computer the page
you want is stored on - your Web browser allows you to connect seamlessly to many different systems.
 large universe of documents: Anyone can publish a Web page - and nearly anyone has! No matter
what obscure information you want to find, there is bound to be someone out there who has written a
Web page about it.
The World Wide Web (WWW) is most often called the Web.

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 Terminology

What's the relationship between the WWW and the Internet?

The World Wide Web is just one of the many services that the Internet
provides. Some other services provided by the Internet are email, FTP,
gopher, telnet and Usenet.

Almost every protocol type available on the Internet is accessible on the web
including the following components: Email, FTP, Telnet, User news, HTTP

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 Terminology

How does the WWW work?

Web information is stored in documents called Web pages.  Web pages are web
documents that are created using Hypertext markup language (HTML).

It is everything you can see on your PC's browser window at one time.

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 Internet Technologies

Important Internet Technologies

The World Wide Web depends on some important technologies in order to

work. These include:

 TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol)

 IP addresses.
 Domain names.

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 Internet Technologies

TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol)

Is a whole set of related protocols and tools that help computers to communicate with
each other.

Some that are used on the internet include:

 SMTP – for sending email messages.
 FTP – allows files to be easily copied to and from remote sites.

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 Internet Technologies

IP Addresses

An IP address is a unique numerical address assigned to every machine on

the Internet.

The IPv4 address is a 32 bit binary number normally represented as 4

decimal values i.e. octets. Each octet represents 8 bits in range from 0 to
255 separated by decimal points. This method of notation is called the
dotted decimal notation e.g. 216.27.61.137

IPv6 addresses are emerging which are written as eight 4-digit,

hexadecimal numbers separated by colons. Why?

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 Internet Technologies

Domain Names

This is a unique name that identifies an Internet site.

It is an alpha-numeric representation of the IP address. The characters are
separated by dots and correspond to an IP address e.g. www.riarauniversity.ac.ke

 IP addresses are not user friendly and could cause typing errors; the domain
name system (DNS) was created so people would not have to remember
several confusing numbers.
 Domain names enable short, alphabetical names to be assigned to IP
addresses.
 They are easier to remember and to work with than an IP address and are
informative and convenient to people.

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 Internet Technologies

Domain Names

A domain name is divided into two main parts:

1. First level
It is an extension and is assigned according to what kind of domain it
represents

E.g.
Domain name Type of domain
Edu Educational institution
Gov Government organization
Mil Military organization
Net Network service provider
Com Commercial organization
Org Organizations
Ac Academics domain
Uk United Kingdom domain
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Ke Kenyan domain
 Internet Technologies

Domain Names

2. Second level
It is a name one chooses or the main host of the Internet.
E.g. www.mail.yahoo.com 

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 Internet Technologies

Domain Names

Domain name contains the following information

 the name of the organization
 the organization itself
 the country
 the particular computer or network

The name www.cnn.com actually has three parts:

 The host name ("www")
 The domain name (“cnn")
 The top-level domain name ("com")

 
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 World Wide Web Technologies

On its own, the internet provides the possibility for different

computers across the world to connect to each other and
transfer data.

However the World Wide Web adds some very important

technologies to the underlying platform of the Internet. These
include:
 HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol)
 HTML
 URLs, URIs and URNs

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 World Wide Web Technologies

HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol)

WWW uses HTTP to send information.

When using this protocol, the domain name (or IP address) is

preceded by ‘http://’

HTTP is a request-response protocol as will be seen under the

section on web browsers.

HTTP requests are always of a specific type; GET, POST

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 World Wide Web Technologies

The HTTP request-response cycle

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 World Wide Web Technologies

HTML

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language where Hyper

means active.

It represents textual and image content.

It is platform independent. This means that the text and the

content are encoded in a way that they can be displayed on a
wide range of computers.

This will be covered in details later in the course.

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 World Wide Web Technologies
URLs, URIs and URNs

Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) are the complete

specifications of the locations of Internet resources.

A URL comprises a number of elements:

 The protocol of the request (browser’s default is usually
http://)
 The IP address or domain of the server.
 The port number (port 80 for HTTP and 443 for HTTPS)
 The subdirectory path from the ‘document root’ (if applicable)
 The name of the resource (though there is often a default
page which is loaded if no name is specified)

Example: http://www.cnn.com:80/help/callcentres.htm
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 World Wide Web Technologies

URLs, URIs and URNs

A URL is a specific kind of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)

which identifies a resource that can be downloaded from the
web.

Another specific type of URI is the Uniform Resource Name

(URN) whose purpose is to provide a globally unique name for
something, not necessarily to provide a name that points to a
web-based resource.

The term URL is very widely used, but URI is the more general
(and correct) term.

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 Web Application Architecture
Layers
The concept of a layered architecture is one where we regard
different parts of a software system as having a separate role.

This is a conceptual, rather than the physical, layering of system

components.

The basic three layers are:

1. The presentation layer – deals with the user interface.
2. The business logic layer – handles the business processes
and concepts used in the application.
3. The data management layer – deals with managing and
persisting the underlying data in the system.

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 Web Application Architecture

Layers

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 Web Application Architecture

Tiers and Distributed Systems

The term ‘tier’ is generally used to mean physically separated
devices.

A multi tier system is therefore one that is deployed on multiple

different nodes (computers).

Using multiple tiers is necessary when we want to make our

applications distributed and scalable.

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 Web Application Architecture

Tiers and Distributed Systems

Consider a web-based banking system:

 The presentation layer, which would be a web browser,

would be distributed across all the users’ computers.

 The application layer would be running on a central

computer, or multiple computers, somewhere at the
bank.

 The data management layer would be running on a

separate machine (probably several) to cope up with
large numbers of users and to assist in security.
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 Web Application Architecture

N-Tier Architecture

Once we start using large numbers of computers running

different parts of the system across multiple tiers, we have an n-
tier architecture.

 N-tier architectures are a fundamental part of web

applications because the presentation layer (running in
web browsers) is always widely distributed
 The large number of users of some of these systems
means that the business logic and data management
layers may also have to be distributed across multiple
machines.
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 Web Application Architecture

N-Tier Web Architecture

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 Web Browser

Computers reading the Web pages are called Web

clients.

Web clients view the pages with a program called a Web

browser.

A web browser is a piece of software that runs on your

computer and allows you to view Web pages.

Examples of web browsers include:

 Internet Explorer.
 Mozilla Firefox
 Opera
 Google Chrome among others.
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 Web Browser

How does the browser fetch the pages?

 A browser fetches a Web page from a server by a request.
 A request is a standard HTTP request containing a page
address.
 A page address looks like this:
http://www.someone.com/page.html.

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 Web Browser

How does the browser display the pages?

 All Web pages contain instructions for display

 The browser displays the page by reading these
instructions.
 The most common display instructions are called HTML
tags.
 HTML tags look like this <p>This is a Paragraph</p>.

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 Web Server

A group of web pages that are related and logically

connected is called a website. A web site may contain a
single web page or many interconnected web pages.

These web pages are stored on computers called Web

servers.

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 Web Server
At its core, a web server serves static content to a web
browser by loading a file from a disk and serving it across
the network to a user’s web browser. This entire exchange
is mediated by the browser and server talking to each
other using HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

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