This class builds on concepts learned in the introductory programming class that I offer. We will concentrate on developing web services in a service-oriented architecture (SOA), which allows for modular development in a language-agnostic environment, communicating via REST and XML. Development will occur in a collaborative, version-controlled, delegated, modular manner.

The project we will be working on is a web “scout” for user-specified items, query-parameters, and price criteria, using Ruby on Rails to power the HTML user interface (UI) and REST API, and Ruby to power the “spider” that “crawls” for results and reports to and from the UI.

Requirements for this course are an introductory background in Perl/PHP/Python/Ruby or an intermediate/advanced background in any other programming language such as Java or a flavor of C. Desired experience includes three or more of the following: SQL and basic database knowledge, UNIX and its command line interface, XML, REST, MVC architectures, HTTP, and HTML/CSS. A laptop is highly, highly recommended (please do what you can to procure or borrow one for class as there will be many hands-on activities). The class website is being totally redone and will be added to by students this semester. It can be found at www.flossclass.com