0 – Introduction to the Laboratory of Distributed Systems

The Web as a Source of Knowledge

• Associations & organisations play an essential role for scientists, engineers and practitioners interested in the engineering of computational systems. From their website, it is possible to understand a lot of how they are structured, which are their goals, and which service they provide. The largest / most relevant international ones are listed below:
  • ACM
  • ECMA
  • IEEE, IEEE CS
  • ISO
  • OMG
  • W3C
• In the engineering of complex distributed systems of any sort, an essential role is played by the existence and development of standards, which are typical produced by cooperative efforts within international organisations:
  • ECMA Standards
  • IEEE Publications & Standards
  • ISO Standards & Standards Development
  • OMG Specifications
  • W3C Standards
• The Web is stuffed with a huge number of online tutorials about most of the topics of interest for this course. Ofter, during the lab classes, we will experiment with them. For instance, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides a page with on line tutorial and courses.

An Organisation for the Web: The W3C

• About W3C
• History of the World Wide Web on Wikipedia and on the W3C
• By observing the organisation of the standards on the W3C site, one could easily understand a number of interesting things—first of all, the main issues that the Web is today facing, and the corresponding conceptual structure of the W3 Consortium:
  • Web Design & Applications
  • Web Architecture
  • Semantic Web
  • XML Technology
  • Web of Services
  • Web of Devices
  • Browsers and Authoring Tools