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October 2008 Calendar

CS Masters' Thesis Defense

Title: A dynamic database driven approach for loading JavaScript using the XMLHttpRequest API
Speaker: Parth Bhatt
Date: Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Time: 3:00 p.m.
Location: GMCS 405
Thesis advisor: Dr Subrata Bhattacharjee

Abstract:
The innovation of the internet has made access to external resources in front of a computer screen only a mouse click away. As technology grows, this ease continues to expand.

In its first generation, software was strictly based on a computer machine. Each machine requires an installer to install the software. Although this methodology worked, users started realizing drawbacks of this architecture. For instance, an individual may interact with several computers through out a day. This requires the software has to be installed on every computer; therefore, this could not be a final solution. In addition, because of licensing policies, software should be bound to a user regardless of which computer is being used.

After invention of the Internet, things have become much easier for users as they have access to a web browser in several locations provided the user?s software is constructed on the web. The only disadvantage with internet based applications is that the web pages are always refreshed when only a small amount of data is required to be changed on the web pages. Dynamic HTML (DHTML) rendering inside a web page allows making changes in a web page without refreshing or changing a web page.

However, when a user wants to download a script for a client, the only option is to load them using standard Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP). As long as the number of client files is small, time taken to load JavaScript is not significantly high. But as soon as the number of files increases, the process becomes slower. Also in this architecture, every single file has to be downloaded sequentially. Unless all files are downloaded, no client code can be initialized. Research in this thesis will show how JavaScript can be downloaded using web services. In addition, it will also address how to request files in a group and how to request them at runtime. Instead of storing files in a folder, each file will get stored in a database table, and when requested a web service will return requested JavaScript to the client.
This architecture can be expanded further using obfuscation of script files and encryption using Huffman encoding.
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