Project 1 Rough Guidance

PREAMBLE: Alright, this project is embracing our new AI-powered coding realities. I expect students to be asking chatGPT or some LLM for help in making things happen. So I'm shifting a bit more from mastering the basics to practice deploying a real thing and a bit more breadth of exposure. Also pen-testing APIs is a viable way to make a cyber living with this skillset so I thought it would be nice to play in that space which is as relevant as ever.

CORE PROJECT SPECS: I want you to make a database powered To-Do App in 3 different stacks. To-do apps don't need a ton of functionality, but you do need the following:

• A user must be able to authenticate
• Each user should be able to store their to-do list in a database
• A user should be able to CRUD their to-do items (Create, Read, Update, Destroy), including marking an item as done
• No one else should be able to access other people's to-do list (unless you add share functionality)
• Use a REST API in at least one of your architectures

What stacks are out there?

• LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) this stack runs 75% of the internet [it reigned from 1999 - 2008] (you can swap Apache for NGINX and MySQL for any classic SQL DB)
• MEAN (Mongo, Express, Angular, Node) this stack is the king of 2008-2018ish (you can swap Angular for React/Vue/Vanilla/jQuery)
• Serverless Stacks (Firebase is an Andy favorite or AWS lambdas, API gateway, Aurora, etc)
• .NET (Have fun... I know nothing of these)
• Java/SWING (Have fun... I know nothing of these)
• Flask and friends (Python based)
• Ruby on Rails (Ruby is cute)
• Microservices on some cloud provider or another

Some notes: You don't need to rebuild the front end for each different backend. I'm encouraging you to make your front-end once and use it with several different backends which is a plus of API based structures.

(Although if you go firebase you won't really have a backend.)