-- DonaldActon - 05 Jul 2011

Course Time Line (For January 2012)

Week 1 - January 5

Week 2 - Jan 10, 12

SocketProgramming part 1
SocketProgramming part 2

Week 3 - Jan 17, 19

One way that this section could go is to start the students out by having them invent a protocol for something. One of the key things would be to get to students to deal with issues like data formats, the rules for exchanging data (i.e. requests and responses) and completeness as in having to identify all possible scenarios. From that base students would then move on to interacting with a real server of some sort. Interacting with a mail server would be nice so that students get exposed to the idea of how little security there is around mail. A second client server activity would be to do something with an http server with a focus on server side issues. (Or maybe we could have them develop a simple server, or go back to an echo server that they may have worked on in the socket programming module.) Ideally this would lead into a discussion of handling multiple clients at a time and also performance issues associated with different HTTP request strategies like closing the connection when the response is finished as opposed to keeping it open and then sending a new request or keeping the connection open and pipelining requests.

Introduction to Client Server programming and protocols
- Construction of simple client and server
This lecture session would focus on exploring and developing protocols.