Maseno University

Department of Information Technology

Web development – These are all the activities involved in building and

maintaining web applications for the world wide web. These range from small

static websites, web apps, e-commerce sites, online banking systems,

Progressive Web Apps etc.

Programmers use different programming languages to develop web

applications and websites. Web development could be categorised into two

1. Front end development/ client-side development- This is the

development of interfaces that users of websites/apps interact with. It’s

mostly concerned with taking care of layout, design, interactivity and

user experience. HTML, CSS and JavaScript are used.

2. Backend development - Back end is the server side of a web

application including methods and platforms for communication

between the database and the web browser. This kind of development

involves ensuring the data storage(database) and the application run as

needed and their interaction produce desired results. Programming

languages used include PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python and .Net

Full stack developers/development – This is a general development of both

front end and back end. (Full stack developers are familiar with both front

end and back end.

traverse information on the WWW/ simply put access resources from the

WWW. Web application are only accessible through. E.g. Firefox, Google

Chrome etc.

Request-Response Cycle

This is the process describing what happens when a computer requests a file

from a server on the web and the server responds with the appropriate file/s.

(what happens when you type something on the address bar of a browser and

hit enter)

Referring to networking - LAN, WAN, MAN etc one of the topologies is Client

server model as shown below.

Networks has both

1. Client Machines - Machines for personal use/used by network end

users

2. Server Machine – Machines in the network that contains shared

resources
From a client machine, a user types a web address called Uniform Resource

Locator (URL). An example of a URL is https://www.maseno.ac.ke/index.html

URLs contain three main parts

1. The protocol – In this case (https://www.maseno.ac.ke/index.html)

https. Protocols tells the browser how to connect and which protocol to

use when it accesses a page on a website.

2. The Domain - Where to find the document requested - maseno.ac.ke

– Domains identifies the entity you want to connect to. This contains

the top level domain and second level domain as determined by ICANN-

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

3. The document - What specific file is needed - index.html

URLs could also contain – Subdomain - https://ecampus.edutab.africa/ ,

subdirectory - https://www.edutab.africa/ecampus/ - Top Level Domain -

https://www.edutab.africa / https://www.google.com/ - Second-level

Domain - https://www.edutab.africa / https://www.google.com/

http - Hypertext Transfer Protocol - information flowing from server to client

is not encrypted. Very insecure.

https - Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure - HTTPS protocol is an

improvement of http by adding an SSL (secure sockets layer) certificate, which

helps create a secure encrypted connection between the server and the client,

thereby protecting potentially sensitive information from being stolen as it is

transferred between the server and the browser.

FTP – File Transfer Protocol - protocol used for the transfer of computer files

from a server to a client on a computer network.

IP address and Domain Naming Service (DNS)

There are two versions of IP versions

1. IPv4 – Uses a 32bit number format of XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX –

192.168.34.92 to uniquely identify each domain/device on the network.

The entire address pool is 2^32 unique addresses.

2. IPv6 - Uses a 128bit number format in hexadecimal separated into 8

groups of 16 bits by the colons eg

2001:0db8:3c4d:0015:0000:0000:1a2f:1a2b The entire address pool

would be 2^128 Ip addresses.

Each domain has its address as an IP address.

address. Eg – https://www.maseno.ac.ke/index/ would return -

41.204.161.183 .

You can use - https://www.whatismyip.com/dns-lookup/ to check the IP

addresses of your favourite domains.

Recap: Overview

What happens if I type https://www.maseno.ac.ke

1. The browser looks up the domain in the DNS

2. The DNS returns the IP address: 41.204.161.183

3. The browser sends an HTTP request to the server located at that

address.

4. The server finds the requested file and sends it back as a response.

5. The browser takes the response and renders the HTML code as a nice

graphical presentation, often repeating steps 3 – 4 as needed to request

images and other supporting files.

Front end languages include

1. HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language – This is the standard markup

language for developing Web pages. The building blocks of HTML pages

are the HTML elements (paragraphs, tables, headings etc) which are

represented by <> tags (<p> paragraph </p>

2. CSS - Cascading Style Sheets. Scripting language that describes how

HTML elements are to be displayed. Adds more visual appeal and

styling to webpages.

3. JavaScript - A programming language for adding interactivity in

webpages. It also can calculate, manipulate and validate data.

Text editors/IDEs

To write this code you need an IDE or a text editor. These help you author the

web pages as desired. We will use Visual Studio Code in this course for

authoring web pages.

If you do not have a computer – You can use this mobile text editor (Acode) -

https://bit.ly/33TNuts that will enable you write html.

Version control is the practice of tracking and managing changes to software

code.

Similar to documents, whilst writing a report, you start by adding first few

paragraphs and save the report say report14052021.docx meaning that it’s

the initial report. Three days later you edit the report by adding two

paragraphs and save it as – report14052021.docx – This will replace the old

report. To have both reports you would have to save the new report with a

new name say –report17052021.docx- In this context then you would have

two versions of document – one with initial paragraphs and the other with

initial paragraphs and the new paragraphs.

Software development is a continuous process and source code keeps on

changing. Version control system helps us keep the history of edits on a

source code file without having to keep multiple files.

We will use Git and GitHub as our Version Control Systems(VCS) in this

course. Have a read on VCS - Getting started with Version Control Systems-

GitHub - https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2