On the final:

What to expect: Here are the sorts of questions I tend to ask:

Define terms in your own words.
Sketch the execution of an algorithm or protocol. For example, show the vector clocks that each process has at different points on a space-time diagram.
Give pseudocode describing an algorithm or process
Compare different algorithms or approaches and their strengths/weaknesses. For example, active vs. passive replication.
Explain why an algorithm or protocol has the characteristics it does. For example, in passive replication, why does the primary not send data back to the client until after is has synchronized with the backups?

Here are the sorts of questions I will not ask.

Write syntactically correct code/XML/XSLT/RDF. (I may ask you to write pseudocode, but I'll be interested in program correctness, not whether every bracket and colon is in the right place)
Multiple choice, true/false or matching questions.
"Trick" questions - the point of this exam is to test your knowledge of the topics we've covered. I may ask you hard questions, but I won't ask things that are deliberately misleading or deceptive.

You should definitely be comfortable with all of the following material for the final (note: this list is NOT exhaustive - if a topic is not on here, that doesn't guarantee that I won't ask you about it. Everything covered in the class is fair game.) :

From the second half of class:

Distributed Problem Solving
- Loosely coupled problems: SETI@Home, distributed.net, BOINC
- Medium-coupled problems: distributed CSP
Distributed Transactions
- ACID
- Serial equivalence
- Using locks
- Detecting deadlock
- Two-phase commit
Multiagent systems
- Coordination mechanisms
- Contract net
- Distributed Planning
- Cooperative vs. Self-interested agents
- Auctions
  - Types of auctions: English, Dutch, Vickrey, first-price sealed-bid
  - Strategies
  - Efficiency
  - strengths and weaknesses
  - private value vs. correlated value
- Peer-to-peer
  - Architectures
  - Structured vs unstructured
  - CAN and Chord
- Information and Ontology sharing
- Information Integration
From labs:
- Cascading Style Sheets. What are they for? What problems do they solve?
- XML
  - Structure of an XML document
  - Advantages and disadvantages
  - XML as a tree
- XML Schema
  - What problems do XML schemata solve? What is their purpose?
  - Why are schemata written in XML?
- XSLT
  - What is XSLT for? What is the advantage to a rule-based approach to transformation?
  - Given some sample XSLT rules, what do they produce?
- RDF
  - What is the RDF data model? Why is it more expressive than XML?
  - What are subjects, properties and objects?
- REST and SOAP
  - What are advantages and disadvantages of the REST style of web services as opposed to SOAP?
  - Describe the architecture of a REST/SOAP client or server.
From the first half of class:
- Concepts:
  - Concepts:
    - Definition of a distributed system
    - Reliable communication
    - Synchronous vs Asynchronous communication
    - Transparency
    - Flexibility
    - Reliability
    - Types of failures: Crash and Byzantine
    - Network Layers
    - happens-before relation
    - spacetime diagrams
    - Liveness
    - Middleware - what is it?
    - Client-server model
    - Proxies and caches - what problem do they solve?
    - Network computers and thin clients
    - Web services
    - FIFO, Causal, total ordering
    - Multicast
    - Fault tolerance
  - Algorithms and Protocols
    - Logical clocks
    - Vector clocks
    - Failure detection
    - Mutual exclusion: centralized
    - Mutual exclusion: token ring
    - Mutual exclusion: multicast
    - Leader election: ring-based
    - Leader election: bully algorithm
    - Conditions for solving consensus
    - Passive replication
    - Active replication
    - Lazy replication