Upon completion of this course, students will be able to do the following.
This course addresses the concepts and techniques of service-oriented computing with a grounding in Web services. It introduces the basic Web services standards and have students apply them in project work. However, the main emphasis of this course is on the concepts that underlie the syntactic details of the standards.
Service-oriented computing has become an important paradigm for information technology architectures and applications. The basic standards and existing literature on service-oriented computing have been focused on the lower-level, infrastructural matters. But as these become well-understood, emphasis has shifted to deeper foundational topics. In particular, in emerging practice, the classical Web services triangle of publish, find, and bind is being upgraded to sophisticated descriptions, selection, and engagement. This upgrade requires the introduction of techniques for information and process semantics, specifically, conceptual modeling, ontologies, matchmaking, messaging, transactions, and processes.
Service-oriented computing requires a strong open systems perspective. For example, services in general are not invoked but are engaged, meaning that the interactions one has with them are quite unlike method invocations and are better modeled as parts of extended conversations. Protocols, in this sense, replace programming interfaces as an abstraction for programming. Similarly, selecting the right service is more than simply looking up a directory with a method signature, and involves considerations of application-level trust.
Some of the key techniques for service-oriented computing were developed in the areas of databases, distributed computing, artificial intelligence, and multiagent systems, and can be readily adapted for service composition. Other techniques must be developed from scratch, so as to address the essential openness and scale of Web applications that previous work did not need to address.
This course seeks to discuss the key concepts for service-oriented computing. Its intent is to formulate the foundational concepts of services, to evaluate existing approaches, and to present existing techniques from other areas that can be adopted for services, and lastly to introduce emerging techniques for addressing challenges that are unique to services.
This course is self-contained, and gives the essential background for anyone planning to learn about and contribute to the principles and applications of services.
The following are the main topics of this course. The tentative schedule indicates the estimated number of class days for each topic.
Besides the programming assignments, students are expected to come up with a project of their own choosing. This project should generally be something that interests the student, building upon knowledge that they have or wish to develop. I will discuss a couple of examples in class. A project would involve a project report but most of its effort would be in the implementation. The submission will include a suitable self-contained module and instructions that the TA can test.
Students may alternatively write a term paper, most of whose effort will go into thinking and writing. Grading will be highly subjective although guided by a posted rubric. The term paper won't be the easier option and is not recommended for all students.
Students in CSC 450 are encouraged, but not required, to work in teams of up to four people so they can tackle more interesting projects.
The proposal, interim submission, and final submission will be weighted at 20%, 30%, and 50% of the project (or term paper) grade.
| Component | 750 campus | 750 EOL | 450 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exams | 30% | 35% | 25% |
| Programming | 10% | 10% | 10% |
| Paper or Project | 50% | 50% | 50% |
| Homework | 5% | 5% | 5% |
| Participation | 5% | 0% | 10% |
The course is mostly self-contained for computer science students. The main thing you need is maturity in thinking about subtle concepts. Experience with conceptual modeling in databases or software helps; familiarity with database transactions is also valuable. Beyond that, for your project you should choose areas where you have some prior knowledge or a deep interest to learn more.
From long experience, I have learned that the material in CSC 226, in particular, is essential for advanced courses such as this one. Here is a (partial) list of topics that will be assumed: elementary set theory, relations, partial orders, functions, concept of a theorem, propositional logic, and predicate logic.
I recommend you brush up on these topics if you aren't comfortable with them. These topics are covered in CSC 226: Applied Discrete Mathematics. You may review Chapters 1 to 6 from the following book, which is sometimes used as the CSC 226 textbook: