Web applications from the ground up, by Mitchell Tannenbaum February 8, 2010

Hey Everyone,

It was a pleasure meeting many of you yesterday and coming to my first PLUG
meeting. I got the feeling that many of you were able to take away
something from our discussion on Drupal and for those who are further
interested, I'll be giving another talk tomorrow.

We'll cover web applications from a few different angles, starting with what
they are and how they are commonly used; this will be a kind of quick behind
the scenes look as well a tour of common use cases. Then we'll look deeper
into building them using two frameworks, Drupal and Django. This will help
those of you who are interested in starting new projects and are not yet
familiar with some of the available tools.

Next, we'll look closer at the different projects you can use to assemble
your full stack. These are the underlying components of web applications;
the most common configuration is called LAMP: Linux Apache MySQL and PHP.
However we'll also cover alternative web servers, database engines, and
scripting languages, notably: nginx, SQLite, and Python.

Finally, we'll get some hands on experience with modular development and
middleware to see how web applications can be used in all types of
environments. This demonstration will illustrate the power of effective and
efficient web application programming and how any environment can benefit.

I look forward to seeing many of you again and meeting new people too.
Prof. Harshad Gune organized this event, and if you have questions or ideas
on how this talk can be further extended, we can discuss and plan them in
this thread or at the live event.

Namaste,
Mitchell