This module will introduce students to the concepts and techniques underlying the World Wide Web, such that they will gain a working knowledge of how to structure and build websites. Students will be introduced to databases and SQL in order to create dynamic, data-driven web applications. Examples and project work will be relevant to each group of students in so far as possible.

Introduction to the world wide web: web browsers, web serves and clients, uniform resource locators, the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), processing HTTP requests and responses, world wide web consortium (W3C), static and dynamic content. Document content and structure, mark-up languages, elements and attributes, document type definition (DTD), hypertext and hypermedia. Hypertext Mark0up Language (HTML); standard HTML document structure, HTML syntax, tags, text formatting, colours, images, hypertext links, absolute and relative referencing, list, tables, frames and forms. Considerations when including audio, video and graphics; differentiating between file formats. Embedding PHP in HTML; assigning and using variable values, saving form input in variables, simple data types, detecting the data type of a variable, using operators: arithmetic, relational, logical; string operators, auto increment/decrement operators, operator precedence; selection and looping constructs. Sessions and cookies: creating a session and registering session variables, destroying a session; setting cookies, retrieving cookie data, deleting cookies. File manipulation: reading data from and writing data to files. Introduction to relational databases: tables, records, fields, primary keys and foreign keys. Introduction to Structured Query Language (SQL); creating tables: specifying field data types, retrieving, inserting, editing and deleting records. Connecting to a database in PHP and executing SQL commands.

On successful completion of this module, students should be able to: 1. Differentiate between static and dynamic web pages. 2. Accept, validate and process user input submitted via online forms. 3. Read and parse text files. 4. Use functions and classes to build modular, reusable code. 5. Authenticate and track users with sessions and cookies. 6. Store data in and retrieve data from a database. 7. Perform efficient exception handling and error processing.

N/A

N/A