Aim
With the introduction of the Internet, networked communications have become a critical tool in the implementation of sophisticated computer services. The course gives an overview of the fundamental techniques necessary to design and create applications that can communicate over networks. It is also a starting point for further studies in the area.

Knowledge and understanding
For a passing grade the student must

• Understand the major software problems that arise when computers communicate with each other via a network, more specifically the Internet, and solutions to them.

• Be familiar with the most common transmission methods and protocols to send messages via a computer network and how they are used in network solutions on a higher abstraction level.

• Be familiar with common software architectures for distributed systems.

• Be able to describe the principles behind web-based software systems as well as some common techniques and protocols used in the area.

• Know how multithreaded programs work and how mutual exclusion and simple signalling between threads are achieved.

Skills and abilities
For a passing grade the student must

• Understand and be able to write computer programs that communicate with each other via a network

• Understand and be able to use common standard protocols to send messages.

• Design and implement client/server solutions that function within a web-based environment.

• Understand and be able to use multithreading to handle concurrent communication over several communication channels and guarantee the synchronization of the threads.

Contents
The laboratory exercises and the project are intended to have the students apply their previously achieved programming experiences in a network-based environment.

Message passing over a network

• protocols: IP-TCP-UDP

• streams/datagram

• sockets/pipes

• broadcast/multicast

Remote code execution

• RPC (Remote Procedure Call)

• RMI (Java)

• threads

• mutual exclusion

• web servers

• protocols, HTTP

• web input forms

• Applets/JavaScript

• CGI/Servlets/JSP

• synchronization issues, race conditions

• distributed objects - serialization in Java

Literature
Harold, E R: Java Network Programming, 3rd Edition. O'Reilly & Associates 2004. ISBN: 0-596-00721-3.