Web Technologies for Social Networking Dr Dan Everett Master of Internet Technology program University of Georgia, US

Two big questions

Outline of this talk

The Great Development Debate: 1950's – 1970's Import-substitution development strategy vs Export-led development strategy

Thomas Friedman, Apostle of Neoliberalism

What is a social networking site?

Some social networking projects done by the MIT program An organization of volunteers building a community playground Caregivers of autistic individuals Practitioners of child law Students preparing for careers as health care executives

Facebook

Communities of practice

Communities of Practice, Social networking sites, and Ontologies

A spectrum of tools for building social networks

Content management system: A web site whose information content is stored in a database An engine to dynamically generate pages from the stored content An administrator who designs the layout, monitors site content, and assigns roles to users

Taiwanese government site

Site for Web Programmers

A Jordanian Drupal site

Drupal useful features

Vulnerability to an SQL injection attack Consider a Web site that responds to an input form providing two user-entered values, login- name and my_pwd. The server program inserts these user- suppled values into an SQL query: “Select userName from User where login='login- name' and password='my_pwd'” If this query returns a result, the user is valid.

The Evil Hacker strikes! The Evil Hacker enters the following values into the form: Your login name: login-name Your password: my_pwd'; update User set password='my_pwd

The Evil Hacker strikes! The server is deceived into executing this: “Select userName from User where login='login-name' and password='my_pwd'; update User set password='my_pwd'” The server changes the password of every user into the evil hacker's password!

Scripting languages

Java-based Web Apps

Model-View-Controller Architecture

Automated Unit Testing

J2EE – adding Enterprise Beans