Happy Thanksgiving!  Lecture, office hours, and section are canceled November 27, 28, and 29.

Scores for the midterm have been posted on Gradesource.  For more information, see the section notes for November 22 and this grading guide.

The deadline for the fourth and last project is 5pm, Friday December 6.  The bonus for early submission is 5% per day early, up to a maximum of four days. One day early means before 11:59pm on Thursday December 5, etc.  Use lessons from the explanation of scores for the second project to do well in the current project.

Here are important notes on computer accounts, on how to run PHP programs, and on how to submit each assignment.
 

OVERVIEW

The course will cover architectures for server-side web-based systems that scale to thousands and even millions of users.  The topics discussed will be related to Windows DNA, Microsoft .NET, and Sun ONE, but will not be vendor-specific.  Standards for information exchange over the Internet including XML and SOAP will be covered.

If time permits, the course will also cover algorithms for organizing and searching web-based information, such as those used by the Google search engine.

Topics that will be mentioned in 134A but not covered systematically include IP networking, relational database systems in general, the internals of web servers, HTML and Javascript, and user interface design.
 
 

ORGANIZATION

For registration in Fall 2002, the section id is 444869.  As of September 25, the course is full with over 120 students registered.  The course will be offered again in 2003, so you may add 134A now only if you will graduate in June 2003 or earlier.  To add the course, you must bring proof of your graduation date to the CSE undergraduate affairs office.  Pat Raczka will verify your documentation and then enroll you immediately in 134A for this quarter.

Lectures will be on Mondays and Wednesdays from 5pm to 6:20pm in Center Hall room 109.  Students must also be available for a discussion section between 5pm and 5:50pm on Fridays, in Center Hall room 105.

The course has one instructor and three excellent teaching assistants (TAs):
 

Name	Email	Office Hours	Office Location
Charles Elkan	elkan@cs	send email for an appointment	APM 4856
Greg Hamerly	ghamerly@cs	TuTh 5-6pm	APM 3349A
Dana Dahlstrom		M 11am-noon, F 4-5pm	APM 3349A
Greg Chun	gchun@cs.ucsd.edu	MW 4-5pm	APM 3349A

There is a Discus web-based message board.  Please ask all questions here, ecept questions that are strictly personal.  See here for the message board from last year.
 
 

CALENDAR

LECTURES AND SECTIONS

Section notes will also be published here.  Notes may be in HTML or Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF).
 

EXAMINATIONS

Here are the Spring 2001 midterm and final examination.  Sample solutions are not available currently.  The Fall 2001 exams were very similar.

For the exams you may bring and use the following materials: one PHP book and one MySQL book, your own personal hand-written notes, documents handed out in class, and a printed copy of the published lecture notes.  You may not use any other materials.

The midterm will count for 1/6 of your overall grade and the final for 1/3.   Your grade will therefore be based 1/2 on your individual work, as reflected in the exams, and 1/2 on your project work.

Grading will not be based on arbitrary numerical standards, nor will there be a fixed "curve." There is no fixed correspondence between letter grades and numerical scores on the assignments or on the exams.  You can evaluate your performance in the class by comparing your scores with the means and standard deviations, which will be announced.  However there is also no fixed correspondence between letter grades and standard deviations above or below the mean.  If all students do well in the absolute and compared to previous years, then all students will get a good grade.

You should not drop CSE 134A just because you are unhappy with the score that you receive on the midterm or on a project assignment.  Instead, you should make an appointment to discuss with the instructor or with a TA how you can do better on the final and on following projects.
 
 

PROJECTS

Here are the grading criteria for the first project, and here is the explanation of scores for it.

The second project involved building a discussion board.  Here is a detailed explanation of scores.

All projects except the first one require you to work in a team of exactly three people and to write a good quality project report.  You must understand and follow these general guidelines for each team project.  Attached to the report for each project should be one filled-in team self-evaluation form.  Perfect academic honesty is always required.

The first project will be worth 5% of your total grade.  Each of the three team projects will be worth 15%.  Both parts of each project (your working code and your team report) will be due before class begins on the due date.  If a project is late, you will lose 20% of the maximum possible score for that project, for each day or part of a day that the project is late.
 
 

READINGS

• Professional PHP4 Programming by Deepak Thomas and others, Wrox Press, 2002.
• MySQL by Paul DuBois, New Riders Publishing, 1999.

• Session Handling with PHP4 by Tobias Ratschiller
• A Blueprint for Building Web Sites Using the Microsoft Windows DNA Platform, Microsoft, January 2000.  (In PDF, 43 pages and about 3.7 megabytes.  HTML version without figures.)
• Building a Large-scale E-commerce Site with Apache and mod_perl by Perrin Harkins, October 2001.  This is a case study of the etoys.com site, which was the third busiest e-commerce site before Christmas 1999 and Christmas 2000, after Ebay and Amazon.  The article shows how to design a multi-tier architecture with component-based software using a scripting language similar to PHP.
• Tellme More by Jonathan Eisenzopf, internet.com, February 2001
• XML in a Nutshell by Elliotte Rusty Harold and W. Scott Means, O'Reilly, January 2001, Chapters 1, 2, and parts of 3 and 7.  (You may use other XML references--this particular book is not required.)
• Introduction to XML by Refsnes Data, 1999-2001.

Quite a few of the topics discussed in class will not be in either book, or will be explained differently. Coming to lectures and taking notes carefully is important.  As the quarter progresses, it is your responsibility to locate relevant chapters of the books and to study them.  Use the indexes of the books!  Examinations will be based mainly on the projects and the online lecture notes, but may ask questions that involve knowledge in the books.
 
 

USEFUL LINKS ON PROGRAMMING

Are expensive database systems worth the money? on Slashdot.

How to Write Unmaintainable Code by Roedy Green.
 
 

Most recently updated on December 2, 2002 by Charles Elkan, elkan@cs.ucsd.edu