Community Building
In the IRC chat of 18-Sep-2006 we discussed the prospects for M.Sc students to work on Tuscany related projects as part of their studies. This is certainly possible at Oxford and probably elsewhere. To make this work, we will need a description of each project that is sufficient to both persuade a student to choose this particular topic and also convince their supervisor that this is an appropriate part of their studies.
The following subjects were suggested on IRC.
- JSON databinding
- XSLT integration
- BPEL integration
- OpenJPA integration
- JMS stuff
- Atom binding
- C++ DAS
- XML DAS
- DAS with non-SDO data types
- Hessian binding
- DAS implementation type
We need to decide which of these are our highest priorities and find volunteers to define the content.
Some background information that may help follows.
Example Synopsis
At Oxford, students are required to submit a 1 or 2 page summary of their project topic. Some of the content is specific to the particular student but a large part is a description of the project contents.
The guidelines for students say the following.
"Students may choose any topic that will allow them to demonstrate understanding of software engineering through the medium of a dissertation. The best way of doing this is usually to choose a topic related to one or more of the subjects taught on the Programme. Many students choose topics that are related to their current employment, allowing them to see how the ideas taught in the Programme may be applied alongside current practice.
There are three broad categories:
- Product-based
-involving the application of software engineering techniques to the specification, analysis, design, development, or testing of a particular product. This product could be entirely fictitious, it could exist only as a part of another system, it could be hardware or software, but it must afford an opportunity to apply software engineering techniques.
Any technique or combination of techniques could be applied to—or around—this product. There might be a study of requirements, one or more specifications, some design work, some analysis, some programming, or some testing.
Examples include: an object-oriented design and implementation, with some accompanying analysis; the formal specification of a software component; a case study in requirements engineering.
2. Theory-based 3. Process-based
(Both omitted because they aren't relevant to us.)
Most projects fall into the first category."
For the proposal document itself it goes on to say.
"The work starts with a project proposal: about two pages of text including:
- a description of the subject matter: product, theory, application area, or problem domain; 2. a brief account of the original contribution that the project work might be expected to make; 3. a plan, or outline, of the dissertation, explaining how it will demonstrate the student's understanding; 4. a list of resources that will be required; and 5. a suggested schedule of tasks and delivery dates."
In my opinion we need to generate something that would cover point 1 at least, as well as recognising that under point 5 we have about 4-6 weeks of effort available and while we can't answer point 2 we should at least give the student something to work with.
Related Course
As stated above, students will usually choose a project that is related to one of the courses they have taken. The course that is most relevant to us currently is Web Services, for which the synopsis is web-syllabus.pdf.
However, this course is currently being re-written to convert it into an SOA course which will make it even more relevant to us. I will post a synopsis for that too, once it becomes available.