Post 5: The Second Semester

We started the second semester now with two main projects that we need to accomplish, one with ASP.NET and the other with PHP. It was an interesting start with the career connection lecture; we had different activities that demonstrated how hard or easy for us as developers to deal with the clients and understanding their needs exactly. I think that the career connection course will build over the skills that I learned in the Project management in the first semester.

I mostly liked starting studying PHP as a server side scripting language. It was a quick and intensive start at the first lecture, so I think we will run through more advanced topics that will enhance my previous experience in using PHP, I hope so, especially when I will build a fully functional Content Management System website with my team. All hosting companies support this open source technology because all of them have servers that run on Linux operating system, which is also free.

I think the problem that I am going to face in this semester or the last one is how to upload my ASP.NET Projects, this technology runs only on Windows Server operating system. Although my professor told me that I don’t need to worry for the time being but for the last semester when we start building our portfolio I need to change my hosting service to another one that provides windows server in order to have all my projects online on my own website. Anyhow, as a web developer we need to remember the main difference between Linux and Windows server which Linux is case sensitive while windows is not. This point is so important when we build hyperlinks or accessing other assets or recourses inside the web pages likes the images names for example.

For the programming languages courses, I am a kind of student that heavily depend on the textbooks more than the instructor himself in most of the cases. Using well-known PHP book, Murach’s PHP and MySQL, as the textbook for the PHP course gives me positive thought about what we are going to learn or to achieve in this semester. As a web master for the Chaldean Patriarchal Vicariate website in Jordan, hosted on Linux server, PHP will be the most important subject to me compared with others.

In Information Architecture course, we will start to continue what we planned for the hospital website in the first semester. Now this information will be put into practice, we will use all the information to build our projects: the ASP.NET and the PHP.

Finally, Security and Quality Assurance, as in this course will go through the entire requirement to maintain the required level of quality and secure our products, which are our websites. I didn’t get the chance to look at the textbook yet, the instructor told us that it’s mainly written for Java language but the rules can be applied to other languages also. At the time, I am writing this blog I don’t have experience in using Java language so I think this will be a good opportunity for me to discover the secrets and mysteries of this strongly object oriented language.