IT 432

Spring 2025

Craig Miller

• Home
• Basic Information
• Grades and Policies
• Schedule

Weekly Notes

• Week 10
• Week 1
• Week 2
• Week 3
• Week 4
• Week 5
• Week 6
• Week 7
• Week 8
• Week 9
• Week 10

Assignments

• Assignment 1
• Assignment 2
• Assignment 3
• Assignment 4
• Midterm Report
• Assignment 5
• Assignment 6
• Culminating Project
• Final Report

Technical References

• DOM Introduction
• JavaScript Basics Tutorial
• Mozilla Technical Documents
• HTML Tag Reference
• CSS Property Reference
• JavaScript Guide

Web Architecture Terminology

A web application dynamically creates HTML pages using content from a database. It also serves forms that allow users to update content in the database.

A web framework (e.g. Rails, Flask) provides a lot of starter code to make the development of a web application much easier. Traditional web frameworks use the MVC (Model, View, Controller) architecture:

• Model -- specifies data organization. It includes code for supporting organization and database connection.
• Controller -- handles requests from the browser, accesses data from the model, performs calculations and calls a View for displaying a page.
• View -- Produces a dynamic HTML page based on information from the controller.

Many frameworks have a separate routing system, which handles a request from the web browser and directs it to the right controller.

The diagram below depicts how the traditional MVC components work together.

Frequent characteristics of modern web architectures

• View is component-based
• The client (web browser) handles more of the architecture components, except for the database
• Emphasis on single-page apps