We start our journey to writing more complex, full-stack applications by learning a new programming language: JavaScript (JS). We will need JS to write code that runs in the browser (in Topic 2), but we can also use JS to write code that runs in the server.
We do not assume any prior knowledge JavaScript. We will cover all the parts we need in lecture. After learning the basics of the language, we will see how to write our own HTTP server in JS and then spend some time discussing how to debug the problems that we find in our code.
In this topic, we switch to writing code that runs in the browser, presenting a User Interface (UI) that the user can interact with. We will discuss how UIs are written in modern web apps versus other settings and see how the code of modern web apps gets split up into manageable pieces.
Having written already clients and servers separately, in this topic, we see how to connect them together into full stack applications. In this setting, the potential for difficult debuging is substantial. Bugs in the server can show up as failures in the client and vice versa, in both cases requiring us to debug across multple programs to find the bug.
Before we can talk in detail about correctness of our code, we need a definition of what the code should do. This is called a “specification”. It is important that our specifications are precise. In addition, we would like our tools for writing specifications to work for any language, not just TypeScript. For those two reasons, we will use our own mathematical notation that is independent of programming language. (And we will find additional uses for this notation in subsequent topics.)
More topics coming soon...