615-335 Distributed Systems & Web Applications

Students enrolled in the BSc, BASc or a combined BSc course (except for the BSc/BIS) will receive science credit for the completion of this subject.

615-241 Software Development II (Advanced) or a mark of at least H3 in either 615-240 Concepts in Software Development II or 433-254 Software Design.

615-237 Telecommunications Concepts or 433-353 Networks and Communications.

Modern information systems design places a premium on the separation of the logical application and information architecture from implementation detail. Through adherence to a number of design principles, the application designer, implementer and user thereby gain a number of benefits through 'transparencies' such as the independence of implementation and use from location of modules, or platform architecture, or specific distribution of functionality or data.

In this subject, we study these transparencies and associated design principles and their application, ranging from the early attempts on the Sun ONC/RPC model through to current systems that use CORBA, XML, Web Services and.NET in development of a new generation of e-commerce applications.

Aspects of the following topics will be considered:

• Distributed systems (examples, database and application design and management);

• Client server architectures from 3- to n-tier and through Web Applications Design; and

• Distributed object-based systems and associated technologies, such as CORBA, Enterprise Java Beans/J2EE, WML/WAP (for Mobile Applications) and WebServices/.NET (for B2C and B2B Applications).

At the completion of this subject, students should:

• have a firm understanding of the issues involved in the design, implementation, and management of inter- and intra-organisational distributed systems;

• be able to build small client-server and object-based systems using an application development framework based on Java, CORBA and J2EE; and

• understand the rationale behind emerging distributed systems technologies such as WML, XML, Web Services and.NET and build small prototype systems using these.

Students will also acquire and extend other valuable generic skills in both individual and group-based problem solving and analysis in practical application of theory.

A 2-hour end-of-semester written examination (60%); written assignment and group project work expected to average eight hours per week (40%). The weighting of the individual non-examination assessment components will be announced at the commencement of the subject.