JISC

This project has now completed. See the project website and the final report available at the foot of this page.

The aim of the proposal is to provide sustainability to the one of the outputs of the  MakingTracks Demonstrator project: the web service based implementation of the IEEE 1484.11.3 Data Model for Content Object Communication.

The scope of this proposal is quite limited:  to factor the initial implementation of the IEEE standard from the “Making Tracks” Demonstrator Project into a robust, re-useable, performance tested toolkit and to add in the elements of the Open Source Maturity Model identified in the appendix to the ITT.

Aims and Objectives

The overall aim of the project is to add sustainability to the document literal wrapped style web service of the recent Making Tracks Demonstrator project. The project will disseminate experience in developing document literal style web services to the e-Learning Framework community.

The specific objectives are to:

• Develop a functionality test suite
• Develop performance testing for document literal style web services. Publish experience to e-Learning Framework community
• Develop conformance testing against WS-I Profile 1.1 test suite. Publish experience to e-Learning Framework community
• Writing full documentation and install scripts
• Installing JIRA Issue, Bug and Feature tracking software on project website and other elements of the Open Source Maturity Model
• Maintaining online demonstrators

Project Methodology

The project methodology is to take outputs from a previous demonstrator project and build an infrastructure around the software to add sustainability to existing software. The experience of adding elements of a sustainability model will be communicated to the wider community. For example, a methodology for performance testing document style web service will be developed. Performance testing has been identified as a key aspect of software sustainability and an emerging need within e-Learning Framework toolkit developer community.

Implications/ Deliverables/ Stakeholders

Recent theoretical work on the eFramework, and Service Oriented Architectures, strongly suggest that document style web services are to be preferred over remote procedure style (RPC) web services. However, many toolkit projects continue to use RPC style web services as they are generally easier to implement and more widely documented. This project will re-factor and sustain a document style web service and disseminate valuable development and testing experience to the community.