In-class Exercise 1

You have undoubtedly used quite a few popular and successful internet applications (eg. Facebook, Amazon, etc). Suppose you have a modest server with 2GB of memory, your server is connected to the internet and running a web server, and you want to create a “copycat” application.

Pick one popular and successful internet application and try to reverse engineer it without using any database software.

You should work in teams of 3-4 persons and one of you will present your analysis and architecture at the end of the exercise. Here are some questions to help you think through the reverse engineering process.

No code is required and you may assume that you may use any programming language.