CS290F:About

CS290F Fall 2006 - UCSB Computer Science - Thorsten von Eicken

CS290F is a course taught at the UCSB Department of Computer Science in Fall 2006.

Web 2.0 is redefining the web user experience and simultaneously new infrastructure technologies are redefining what it takes to launch a state-of-the-art web site. Amazon's web services, such as Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), are changing the game for hosting scalable fault-tolerant sites. New programming frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails, are making the development of cool sites child's play (that's the promise anyway). Yet some concerns just don't go away: caching, load balancing, fail-over, redundancy, back-end databases, security, and monitoring to name a few.

In this course students will use the new web technologies and learn how to tackle the scalability and fault-tolerance concerns. This is a "learn by doing" course: course projects, conducted in teams of two, will form the primary focus of the course with the lectures providing background material. It will start with a project to introduce basic web technologies and the Ruby on Rails framework. The next project will experiment with web services offered by the "big four". The final project will introduce typical scalable computing and distributed fault tolerance techniques to build a scalable, redundant web site. Warning: these projects mean that this course will require a significant programming effort!