PRELIMS

Lesson 1: Purpose of a Platform

 A platform is a group of technologies that are used as a base upon which other applications, processes or
technologies are developed.

What is a purpose platform?

 This platform is to mobilize people across society – experts and community members – to create lasting and
sustainable solutions to society's most pressing challenges, i.e. the Common Good.
 Purpose platforms mobilize people to act and even build a social movement
 A computing platform or digital platform is the environment in which a piece of software is executed.
o It may be the hardware or the operating system (OS),
o A web browser and associated application programming interfaces, or other underlying software, as
long as the program code is executed with it.
o Computing platforms have different abstraction levels, including computer architecture, an OS, or
runtime libraries.
o A computing platform is the stage on which computer programs can run.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38Z6JtD4U40

Platforms may also include:

 Hardware alone, in the case of small embedded systems.
Embedded systems can access hardware directly, without an OS;
this is referred to as running on "bare metal".
 A browser in the case of web-based software. The browser itself
runs on a hardware+OS platform,
but this is not relevant to software
running within the browser.

 An application, such as a spreadsheet or word processor,

which hosts software written in an application-specific
scripting language, such as an Excel macro. This can be
extended to writing fully-fledged applications with the
Microsoft Office suite as a platform.

 Software frameworks that provide ready-made functionality.

o Software frameworks may include support programs,
compilers, code libraries, toolsets, and application
programming interfaces (APIs) that bring together all
the different components to enable development of a
project or system.
 Cloud computing and Platform as a Service.
Platform as a service (PaaS) is a cloud computing model
where a third-party provider delivers hardware and
software tools to users over the internet. Usually, these
tools are needed for application development.
  Extending the idea of a software framework, these allow application developers to build software out of
components that are hosted not by the developer, but by the provider, with internet communication
linking them together. Examples: social networking sites Twitter and Facebook are also considered
development platforms.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whx01vzmlns
 The three models of cloud computing are PaaS, SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), and IaaS
(Infrastructure-as-a-Service).
IaaS refers to cloud computing infrastructure – servers,
storage, etc. – managed by a cloud vendor, while SaaS
refers to full applications that are hosted in the cloud
and maintained by the SaaS vendor. If a SaaS customer is
like someone renting a house, then a PaaS customer is
like someone renting all the heavy equipment and
power tools necessary to rapidly build a house, if the
tools and equipment were continually maintained and
repaired by their owner.

 A virtual machine (VM) such as the Java virtual machine or .NET CLR. Applications are compiled into a
format similar to machine code, known as bytecode, which is then executed by the VM.
o A process virtual machine allows a single process to run as an application on a host machine,
providing a platform-independent programming environment by masking the information of the
underlying hardware or operating system.
 An example of a process VM is the Java Virtual Machine, which enables any operating
system to run Java applications as if they were native to that system.
o A system virtual machine is fully virtualized to substitute for a physical machine. A system platform
supports the sharing of a host computer’s physical resources between multiple virtual machines,
each running its own copy of the operating system. This virtualization process relies on a hypervisor,
which can run on bare hardware, such as VMware ESXi, or on top of an operating system.
o A virtualized version of a complete system, including virtualized hardware, OS, software, and storage.
These allow, for instance, a typical Windows program to run on what is physically a Mac.

 In personal computing, a platform is the basic hardware (computer) and software (operating system) on
which software applications can be run. Computers use specific central processing units (CPUs) that are
designed to run specific machine language code.

 A computer platform generally refers to the operating system and computer hardware only. The platform
conforms to a set of standards that enable software developers to develop software applications for the
platform. These same standards allow owners and managers to purchase appropriate applications and
hardware.
References
 https://www.techopedia.com/definition/3411/platform-computing
 https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/serverless/glossary/platform-as-a-service-paas/
 https://www.vmware.com/topics/glossary/content/virtual-machine
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38Z6JtD4U40
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whx01vzmlns
 https://www.bluestacks.com/

Recommended online class for the presentation and discussions.

Assignment: What are examples of window-based platforms and Android-based platforms
Activity: Create a system specification (hardware and basics) of a client PC and server PC of a town municipal
building, make interviews and create the office layout of computer locations.

Laboratory: Platform exploration on bluestack and other emulators for Android