A (Web) Service-Oriented Approach to Teaching CS/IS1 Billy Lim, Bryan Hosack, Paul Vogt School of Information Technology Illinois State University

INTRODUCTIONS Project Personnel Workshop Participants

School of Information Technology Schedule Project Overview/Experience Report (9:00-10:15am) Hands-On Exercises (10:30am-12:00pm) Lunch (12:00-1:00pm) Assignment Development (1:00-2:30pm) Discussion /Feedback (2:45-4:00pm)

School of Information Technology Workshop Objectives 1. Disseminate the use of service-oriented approach to teaching CS1/IS1 2. Explore educational innovations for indoctrinating students the state-of-the-art software development practices using SOA 3. Build a learning/research community of service- orientation-in-CS1/IS1 enthusiasts.

School of Information Technology Project Overview Began with: – "On Integrating Web Services from the Ground Up into CS1/CS2," ACM SIGCSE 2005, St. Louis, MO, Feb., Now supported by: – NSF-DUE-CCLI , "Integrating Service-Oriented Paradigm into Introductory Information Technology Curricula," 2009 – 2011.

School of Information Technology Basic Ideas SOA/Web services have gained popularity in many industries and in upper division/graduate CS/IS curricula Why not introduce service-orientation earlier in the curriculum? – Service-orientation can make a course more interesting – Service-orientation can better prepare students for upper division classes and for the industry upon graduation – Service-orientation can introduce sound principles of software engineering earlier in the curriculum

School of Information Technology Courseware Showcase Main project site: – The site contains info on: – PowerPoint slides – Lab exercises – Programming assignments – Tutorials – List of Web services used

School of Information Technology Experience Report Outcome 1: Students will provide a better evaluation of the IT1 course by 10% as compared to traditional IT1 course evaluations. Students will also indicate a positive perception of the SOA/Web services learning experience. Outcome 2: Student course grade performance will increase in the IT1 course by 10% as compared to traditional IT1 course performance. Outcome 3: Employers of computer science and information technology students will indicate a positive response to an SOA/Web services centered curriculum.

School of Information Technology Experience Report (cont’d) Outcome 1: Limited data…partial support – In hindsight we should have chosen a different measure – The amount of data collected will be limited and probably won’t be statistically significant

School of Information Technology Experience Report (cont’d) Outcome 2: Demographics – 99 students (missing cases were mostly drops) – 34% in WS/SOA section – 12% of the students were female, 88% male – 76% unable to define “What is a WS?” to 88% could define

School of Information Technology Experience Report (cont’d) Outcome 2: Statistically significant improvement in final exam performance and course grade Final Exam Regression Coefficients a Model Unstandardized Coefficients Standardized Coefficients tSig. 95% Confidence Interval for B BStd. ErrorBetaLower BoundUpper Bound 1(Constant) Female Class Tradl CumGPA a. Dependent Variable: FinlExm, Adj R-Squared.493

School of Information Technology Experience Report (cont’d) Outcome 2: Statistically significant improvement in course grade Final Grade Regression Coefficients a Model Unstandardized Coefficients Standardized Coefficients tSig. 95% Confidence Interval for B BStd. ErrorBetaLower BoundUpper Bound 1(Constant) Female Class Tradl CumGPA a. Dependent Variable: Grade Adj R-Squared =.684

Experience Report (cont’d) Outcome 2: Grading bias and other concerns Tukey Pairwise Comparison’s were not significant for the instructors, except for one pairing. This pairing did not include either of the instructor’s teaching the web service sections. More data will help alleviate concerns about the grading Mean Grades Awarded NMeanStd. Deviation Total

School of Information Technology Experience Report (cont’d) Outcome 3: Employers of computer science and information technology students will indicate a positive response to an SOA/Web services centered curriculum. – Survey developed (see handout) – Companies contacted/to contact: Amazon, Google, State Farm (other local users), suggestions…

School of Information Technology Experience Report (cont’d) Continued interest in students after the completion of the class Initial frustration translates to positive response when creating “real-world”-like applications Engaging experience for faculty Second semester syndrome

School of Information Technology Experience Report (cont’d) “Do I have to code this? Isn’t there a Web service to do that?” – A student’s comment on the requirement to “validate … the state’s 2-letter abbreviation (must be one of the 50 state abbreviations).” “But that’s just calling the Web service to get a word from the dictionary, right?” – A student’s remark on needing to handle the part of the assignment that requires them to hit a Web service to randomly generate a word (after he has already completed the part where he provides his own word) in the Hangman program.

Session 2: Web services in CS1/IS1

School of Information Technology Reusable Components Most programs are created by combining components that exist already, not from scratch! Reusing components saves time and money. Reused components are likely to be better developed, and more reliable. New components should be designed to be reusable by other applications. Source: Savitch & Carrano 2009 CS1 text

School of Information Technology Software Reuse Package names Class names Description of class Scanner Source: Savitch & Carrano 2009 CS1 text

School of Information Technology Software Reuse via SOA/WS Latest form of reuse is via “services” SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) – “A system for linking resources on demand. In an SOA, resources are made available to other participants in the network as independent services that are accessed in a standardized way. This provides for more flexible loose coupling of resources than in traditional systems architectures.” –Sybase – “Architecture that describes an entity (e.g., application or enterprise) as a set of interdependent services. SOA provides for reuse of existing services and the rapid deployment of new business capabilities based on existing assets.” -- CIO.gov – Many others …

School of Information Technology Software Reuse via SOA/WS One popular way of implementing SOA is via Web services WS (Web Service) – "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to- machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL). Other systems interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP-messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards.“ – W3Cinteroperablemachine-to- machinenetworkWSDL – Laymen terms: a piece of program that can interact with another program using standardized Web protocols – Examples: Google Maps API, Flickr API, Twitter API, Amazon Web services. (API = Application Programming Interface)

School of Information Technology NetBeans Generated Code Template try { // Call Web Service Operation service = new ; port = service.get (); // TODO initialize WS operation arguments here declarations of arguments here // TODO process result here result = port.methodOfInterest(argument list); System.out.println("Result = "+result); } catch (Exception ex) { // TODO handle custom exceptions here } Bold: Statements of interests; Wish Exception ex was printed as part of the template.

School of Information Technology Decision Structure try { // Call Web Service Operation com.cdyne.ws.profanityws.profanity.Profanity service = new com.cdyne.ws.profanityws.profanity.Profanity(); com.cdyne.ws.profanityws.profanity.ProfanitySoap port = service.getProfanitySoap(); // TODO initialize WS operation arguments here java.lang.String text = “You smoked weed? Dumb!"; // TODO process result here com.cdyne.ws.profanityws.profanity.FilterReturn result = port.simpleProfanityFilter(text); if (result.isFoundProfanity()) … else … } catch (Exception ex) { // TODO handle custom exceptions here }

School of Information Technology Repetition Structure mypackage.ISUDirectoryLookUpService service = new mypackage.ISUDirectoryLookUpService(); mypackage.ISUDirectoryLookUp port = service.getISUDirectoryLookUpPort(); // TODO initialize WS operation arguments here java.lang.String lastName = aLastName; java.lang.String firstName = ""; java.lang.String city = ""; java.lang.String state = ""; java.lang.String zip = ""; // TODO process result here mypackage.DirectoryResult result = port.findPerson(lastName, firstName, city, state, zip);

School of Information Technology Repetition Structure (2) Int listingSize = result.getItems().getDirectoryRecord().size(); for (int i = 0; i < listingSize; i++) { firstName = result.getItems().getDirectoryRecord().get(i).getFirstName(); lastName = result.getItems().getDirectoryRecord().get(i).getLastName(); zip = result.getItems().getDirectoryRecord().get(i).getZip(); phone = result.getItems().getDirectoryRecord().get(i).getPhone(); state = result.getItems().getDirectoryRecord().get(i).getState(); cityNamePrint = result.getItems().getDirectoryRecord().get(i).getCity(); }

School of Information Technology Hands-on Activities d=295 d=295

Session 3: Curriculum Development in CS1/IS1 ?page_id=308

Session 4: The Future of Web services in CS1/IS1 (and CS2/IS2?)

School of Information Technology Group Discussion Topics Phase II objectives? Viability of the current curriculum in other academic institutions? Synthesis across the curriculum?

School of Information Technology Please tell us what you think! and THANK YOU FOR ATTENDING! Feedback