Video 1: What is Programming?

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Del curso dictado por University of New Mexico

Web Application Development: Basic Concepts

124 calificaciones

University of New Mexico

Web Application Development: Basic Concepts

124 calificaciones

This is the first course in a Coursera Specialization track involving Web Application Architectures. This course will give you the basic background, terminology and fundamental concepts that you need to understand in order to build modern full stack web applications. A full stack web developer is familiar with each "layer" of the software technologies involved in a web application, including data modeling and database technologies, the web server environment and middleware components, network protocols, the user interface and basic visual design and user interaction concepts. In this course we will learn by doing. We will start by learning the major components of web application architectures, along with the fundamental design patterns and philosophies that are used to organize them. You will build and continually refine a fully functional full-stack web application as we progress through the modules in this course. Along the way you will be exposed to agile software development practices, numerous tools that software engineers are expected to know how to use, and a modern web application development framework. This course is also available in Spanish. To join the Spanish version, visit this page: https://www.coursera.org/learn/apliweb.

De la lección

Module #2 - Web Applications Frameworks

In this module you will learn about web application frameworks. We will start by talking about the evolution of software and programming languages, and then talk about software application frameworks. The fundamental trade-off we will consider is programmer productivity versus program efficiency. Next you will learn about web application frameworks, as well as the model-view-controller design pattern that is the backbone for many of these frameworks. We will also consider how these frameworks support the agile programming principles associated with modern software practice. This will include a discussion of distributed version control systems and you will learn how to use the popular Git system. We will also demonstrate how to use Git with a Ruby on Rails application. We will use Git to submit all of the programming applications in this specialization.

What are Web App Frameworks? - An Overview0:41

Video 1: What is Programming?6:23

Video 2: Application Frameworks2:45

Video 3: Web Application Frameworks8:04

Video 4: The Model-View-Controller Design Pattern5:00

Conoce a los instructores

Greg Heileman
Professor and Associate Provost
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Manel Martínez-Ramón
Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering

[MUSIC]

In order to understand web application frameworks I'd like to

talk with you a little about programming and why we do it in the first place.

I'd like to also talk with you about the trends that are taking

place in programming.

So to start with, what is programming?

Well, it's the process of creating a sequence of instructions

in some programming language that enable the computer to do something.

And why do we do this?

Well, we want the computer to solve some problem that's useful to us.

Let me talk with you a little bit more about my philosophy associated with

programming and where it's going.

So we can think of programming as the process, or

art form if you like, of mapping a problem from a given problem domain,

to a solution in a given solution domain.

So here we have a real-world problem that we're trying to solve.

And we have the tools associated with a given programming language

at our disposal in order to solve this problem.

Now I believe most of the advances that have occurred with respect to

programming languages over the years

are simply efforts to bridge this gap between these two.

In order to make this more concrete Let's take a look at the Eniac computer.

This is the first electronic digital computer that I talked about in

a previous lesson.

Here's a picture of someone programming the Eniac computer.

They did this by flipping switches and plugging in cables, as you can see here.

In essence, they were hardwiring the machine to execute a program and

it took weeks of effort to get everything right, even for

what today we would consider a very simple program.

So we can think of this as machine level coding.

The programmers were actually flipping bits.

Now the gap between machine code and

the math formula that they were trying to implement was quite large.

Larger than the gap say, between a Fortran program or

some other high level programming language that we use nowadays and

that same math formula that they were trying to solve.

The gap between some object oriented program and

say a discreet advent simulation, is even smaller than this.

In this case objects in the program tend to be objects in the real world.

So the bottom line is this, it's much easier to solve problems

when you're programming language better matches your problem domain.

And this is what has happened over time with advances in programming languages.

Let's talk a little bit more about the evolution of programming and,

more importantly, where software frameworks fit in.

So we've seen that machine level instructions involve setting bits,

a very tedious and error prone process.

The next evolution in programming was assembly language programs.

Assembly language programming is one of the first advances that we had and

it involved collecting a number of machine level instructions together under some

pneumonic, for instance The mnemonic MOV might stand for move and could

be used to move the contents of one memory location to some other memory location.

Now this assembly language distraction might involve a handful of machine

level instructions.

Programmers became much more productive when they started using

assembly language programs.

You might be able to write a more efficient program by using machine code.

That is, a program that runs faster or uses less memory, but

it's going to take you longer.

So, assembly language programming made the programmer more productive.

Now the same thing happened with the advent of high level

programming languages or HLLs as I show here.

What I'm referring to are things like Fortran, COBOL, BASIC, or C.

In this case, a single instruction in a high level programming language generally

corresponds to mini assembly language instructions, and once again the tradeoff

is programmer productivity against the efficiency of the program itself.

The same thing can be said for the advent

of object oriented program languages such as C plus plus or Java.

I remember when these object oriented languages were first introduced.

Many argue it against their youth because they felt they were inefficient.

But once again, as machines become more powerful,

programmer productivity usually wins out over program efficiency.

While we're on this topic, let me say that there is no one best programming language.

In general certain programming languages are better suited to solving certain

types of problems than other programming languages.

In addition, they're constantly changing and evolving and improving, so

get used to it.

The world of software and programming languages is constantly evolving.

And as a software engineer if you want to stay relevant you have to try and

keep up with this.

One more thing.

Arguing about the best programming language or web application framework,

because like Arguing about religion or art.

There's no right answer.

It's often a matter of the problem that needs to be solved and

individual preferences.

That's not to say we can't have discussions about the relative

strengths and weaknesses of various program languages or

frameworks when they're use in various context.

I'm happy to do that.

But at the end of the day, you just can't say that one programming language than

all the other programming languages.

So finally, let's talk about software frameworks.

A software framework provides a whole environment

that is aimed at a specific domain.

For instance, most operating systems have a software framework for

developing applications that will run in their environment.

Microsoft has the Windows Presentation Foundation,

and this is a framework for building Windows-based applications.

Apple's has the Cocoa framework for doing the same.

In Linux, there's the Gnome Or

KDE frameworks that allow you to build these windowing frameworks.

So software frameworks are just a natural evolution

in the programmer productivity program efficiency trajectory.

We'll talk more about application frameworks, next.

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