ABSTRACT

The theme proposed by this paper is entitled Web Security and Real-Time Interactions, a
title that suggests the coverage of two relatively independent sub-domains of a wider domain, that
of Web applications.
Security has been taken into account in the theme presented, primarily due to the current
social and economic context of Web applications. In the actual era of online payments, the
emergence of entities like crypto-coins did not seem to produce any surprise, but was accepted and
adopted by a considerable part of the population. It goes without saying that the provision of such
mechanisms must be accompanied by a much more consistent security layer than those
implemented by the common software industry.
Although the paper does not aim to achieve mechanisms to solve or counter so advanced
problems, security is included in its theme precisely because of the increasing importance it carries,
and the security rules presented in the work and implemented in the application which comes with
it should be seen as minimal security patterns for modern Web applications. Thus, the first chapter
presents an introduction to Web security, and the third chapter of the paper illustrates the
integration of certain security rules into a Web application.
Regarding real-time interactions within Web applications, they refer to automated updates
sent to the user of the application without them explicitly requesting it through an interaction with
the user interface. The need for real-time interactions occurs especially in Web applications where
users do not only communicate with the server but they need interaction with other users.
The idea of addressing the real-time interactions theme arose from a simple dissatisfaction
with the classic way of updating the content of Web pages in real-time, namely sending a request
through AJAX to the server every few seconds. Due to the existence of some good alternatives to
this method, the paper presents other ways to implement real-time interactivity for the Web
application client, presenting these methods in a comparative manner. The second chapter of the
paper introduces these methods, and the fourth chapter provides concrete examples of
implementation within an application. However, the paper does not aim to demonstrate the
necessity of replacing the above described method, nor to demonstrate that its alternatives are
clearly superior, but encourages the choice of the method that is best suited to the implementation,
system, and architecture that support the Web application.
Although these two theoretical aspects represent the foundation of this paper, the developed
application aims, besides combining the two themes of the paper, with the achievement of practical
purposes such as managing a restaurant's services. The application is developed for restaurant
customers and waiters and has the objective of reducing the waiting time in restaurants and also
help waiters manage the orders much easier. The different use cases of the application are
described in the last chapter of the paper.