Preparing for the midterm

Believe it or not, we've actually covered a lot and, I hope, you've learned a lot about the infrastructure of the World Wide Web. Here's what I believe you should know based on the material we've gone over in class (and if you are comfortable with these topics, you should do well on the midterm):

1 - Architecture of the World Wide Web

Section 1

URIs, resources and representation

Section 2 - URI best practices

2 - URIs and HTTP headers in Detail

The material covered in the slides at

http://www.cs.rpi.edu/academics/courses/spring08/websci/URI-HTTP-details.pdf

is all fair game

esp. URIs vs. URLs

The parts of a URL

HTTP response types (by class, not by number)

The HTTP request methods

HTTP headers

3 - Web architecture in practice

What is a three-tiered web app (dynamic content server) and how is it accessed.

4 - spidering

by now you're all experts in this

5 - Caching for efficiency

Server side caching

Conditional gets (the HTTP header fields used and what they mean)

6 - page rank and search

The page rank formula (and being able to apply it)

Relationship between crawler and search engine

Reverse Index and what it comprises (pages, words, word locations, special features)

I won't promise that I won't add something not directly on this list, but I repeat, if you're comfortable with this material, you should do well.