Meeting Preview: Full-Stack WAMP Development – Dan O’Connor
Date: Tuesday, April 4th, 7:30 p.m.
Location: Danbury Hospital Auditorium
Our April meeting will be geared toward web developers, those programmers who develop interactive web sites and web-based applications. A popular technology stack for creating such applications is LAMP (Linux, Apache web server, MySQL database, and the PHP programming language) or WAMP (substitute Windows for Linux as the server operating system). Our speaker is programmer and musician Dan O’Connor, who has previously presented to DACS on the topics of MySpace (remember that early social network?) in March 2007, social networking dos and don’ts in February 2010, and online stock research and trading in September 2011.
Web applications consist of a front end that runs in a web browser and presents the interface that the user sees, and a back end that runs on a server and is where the behind-the-scenes business logic happens. If you fill in a web form to create an account or make an online purchase, the browser first serves up the blank form page, and then submits the information you fill in. The information is transmitted, hopefully over a secure connection, to a server, where it needs to be saved in a database.
PHP is a popular server-side language for web applications. Dan’s demo will show the use of object-oriented PHP, and the Zend Framework, which is a framework for building and testing PHP applications. He’ll also cover SQL, the database query language used to work with a relational database management system such as the open-source MySQL database product.
On the front end he’ll cover JavaScript, the browser scripting language that makes a web page more responsive to user interactions, and the jQuery JavaScript library, which provides common functions and allows the JavaScript code to work across different versions of different web browsers. Traditionally the HTTP protocol used on the web mostly consisted of sending a new page to the browser (a GET), and then submitting information when a user clicked on a button present on the page (a POST). AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a back-channel method that Dan will describe for updating information on the web page without the need for a GET and a POST. Dan will also talk about another useful technology, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), that is a convenient way for the back end to return information so that it is easily rendered by the JavaScript engine in the browser.
Thus Dan will be covering full-stack WAMP for creating web applications, including software design patterns that allow the front and back ends to coordinate with a proper separation of concerns. Without such patterns a web application can get quite messy and be difficult to maintain, as changes are inevitably required over time.
Dan O’Connor is a professional software engineer with over 20 years of experience developing web-based applications. He currently works for Agera Energy and has also been employed with Chaikin Analytics, Pentax Medical, Apelon and IBM.
Dan is always keeping his programming skills up on Hackerrank, Udemy, Team Treehouse and Code School. He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Hartford and completed information systems coursework at American Sentinel University.