 |
To the internet... and beyond! |
|
The summer project I will be working on is part of a much larger, three-year project that the university is working on to provide contemporary canonical software courses for the year 2011-2012. The two specific courses aimed to develop are a web server course and a web browser course, using Apache and Mozilla Firefox respectively as case studies. Our mission, should we choose to accept it (and we already have, haha), is to gain an understanding of the architecture of current web servers and web browser by reverse-engineering Apache and Mozilla Firefox respectively. We also must understand how servers and browsers interact with each other. With this knowledge, we should also be able to explain why certain web browsers and web servers are so successful and survive for so many years. In order to do this, we are first going to organize the knowledge necessary to understand these concepts and software. We will then mine the data for both Apache and Firefox to recover the architecture and represent it in a way that is understandable so that we can use this information to develop the courses. In doing this, we hope to understand: how the structures and features evolve over time, the technologies behind each feature, which and how many parts of the system changed, and how the number of developers change. |