A Custom Framework for Innovative Approach of Teaching Web Development Courses

Abstract

The development of web applications is very complicated these days, as it requires knowledge of a number of technologies in order to create a full-featured application. Students, especially those who are beginners in this field, have problems in connecting all the necessary technologies and languages together. The core of every web application is its server part. where professional frameworks are often used, which shorten the time needed to create an application for experienced developers, but for students who are just learning, they represent an overly complex system, very difficult to master. Therefore, it is best not to use such frameworks for teaching, but to prepare for them simpler and easier to understand tools that they will use when creating their semester projects. In this article, we deal with the creation and description of experiences with our own framework, which we created for the students of our Internet application development course. In it, we describe what causes the biggest problems for students, how we solved them in our framework, and at the same time we provide an evaluation of how the framework has proven itself over several years of use. Also, part of the paper is an evaluation of how students used the framework. The main criterion for evaluation was how many students preferred our framework to others when developing a semester project. We tested the practical use of the framework in web applications for transport, intelligent transport systems and communication systems between vehicles to prove its functionality, even if it was not primarily intended for creating applications for production.

Keywords

• teaching
• methodology
• web development