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Software Engineering for Web Applications

A photo of people and pigeons in the plaza.

A photo of Plaza de Bolivar in Bogota, Colombia found on http://mitupv.mit.edu/, a bilingual online community developed by 6.171 students Aimee Lee and Kathy Lee. (Image courtesy of Sandra Gaviria.)

Instructor(s)

MIT Course Number

6.171

As Taught In

Fall 2003

Level

Undergraduate

Translated Versions

Español

Cite This Course

Course Highlights

This course site features links to online textbooks for the course, as well as a detailed syllabus outlining the history and pedagogy of 6.171.

Course Description

6.171 is a course for students who already have some programming and software engineering experience. The goal is to give students some experience in dealing with those challenges that are unique to Internet applications, such as:

  • concurrency;
  • unpredictable load;
  • security risks;
  • opportunity for wide-area distributed computing;
  • creating a reliable and stateful user experience on top of unreliable connections and stateless protocols;
  • extreme requirements and absurd development schedules;
  • requirements that change mid-way through a project, sometimes because of experience gained from testing with users;
  • user demands for a multi-modal interface.