Seeding the Cloud with Students from Every Computer Science

Undergraduate Program

Joel Hollingsworth and David J. Powell

Department of Computing Sciences, Elon University, Elon, North Carolina, U.S.A.

Keywords: Cloud Computing, Platform as a Service, Enterprise Programming, Server Side Programming, IBM

Smartcloud Enterprise, Google App Engine.

Abstract: The introduction of enterprise-level cloud computing to the computer science curriculum is necessary to

remain consistent with the industry. Cloud computing is rapidly being used throughout industry and there is

a current and projected shortage of IT developers with cloud computing skills. University computer science

curricula need to provide cloud computing courses to prepare graduates to enter the work place. This paper

describes a required cloud based enterprise-level programming course at Elon University that used free

cloud based software and hardware and free training materials. This cloud based development course

provides an example that could be immediately used at any university to give their students the cloud based

skills needed to be successful in the IT market.

1 INTRODUCTION

The two major survey results released by IDC

(International Data Corporation) and IBM in

December 2012 indicated a severe talent shortage in

cloud computing skills in the IT workplace (Helms,

2012; IBMb, 2012). The Microsoft commissioned

IDC surveyed 600 hiring managers from around the

world. The study predicted the IT market to grow

roughly 1.1 to 2.7 percent through 2020 and cloud

related skills to be the primary growth opportunities

in IT employment. The surveyed managers indicate

that finding people with the right skill mix of cloud

skills will be the #1 challenge for companies as the

work force around the world lack cloud computing

skills. The IBM survey had two parallel portions

with one directed to 1200 IT and business decision

makers and the other to academia consisting of 450

students and 250 faculty members from around the

world. The IT decision maker results indicated a

25% major skill gap in hiring cloud computing skills

and a 60% moderate to major skill gap. The

Academia results are even higher with 46%

reporting a major skill gap and 78% a moderate to

major skill gap. Only 6% of graduates have the skills

needed in cloud computing to be successful. The

IBM survey indicated that Academia is moving

slowly to shrink the existing gap with 31 percent of

institutions having no plans to teach cloud

computing and 20 percent planning to teach cloud

computing in the next two years. The biggest

obstacles are cost and lack of access to training.

The hypothesis of this paper is that all

undergraduate CS programs should be immediately

offering a core course in cloud computing. Elon

University has taught a core course in cloud

computing since 2010. There are no obstacles

involving cost as both hardware and software are

free. There are no obstacles in training as training

resources are also freely available. The only

requirement is a faculty member with the desire to

learn and teach cloud computing. This paper

discusses a core course in cloud computing at Elon

University that other institutions may emulate to get

started. The acquisition, the use and the advantages

of free state of the art hardware and software are

enumerated. The course curriculum is then presented

and discussed in terms of format, free instructor

training, student materials and assessment. Finally,

the paper concludes with a brief discussion of a

follow on elective cloud computing course that

builds off of faculty expertise teaching the core

course and future directions.

513

Hollingsworth J. and J. Powell D..

Seeding the Cloud with Students from Every Computer Science Undergraduate Program.

DOI: 10.5220/0004451705130518

In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2013), pages 513-518

ISBN: 978-989-8565-60-0

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

2 CORE COURSE ON CLOUD

COMPUTING

Google is a fast moving leader in web innovation

and open standards. Starting in 2008, Google has

held an annual Google IO developer conference at

the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Each annual

conference has started with a keynote address by the

Google Senior Vice President of Engineering, Vic

Gundotra, in which he presents a high level

overview of Google’s vision of the web and the key

trends and tools that they are encouraging

developers to use to move the web forward. Two

Elon University faculty attended the 2009 annual

conference and were immediately impacted by the

keynote address that the “web has become the

dominant platform of our era” and that since 2004,

there have been no popular desktop applications

developed other than games and browsers used by

millions of users. Application development had

clearly moved to web applications such as Gmail,

Facebook and Wikipedia. Three key trends and tools

described at the 2009 conference were increased

user access to cloud computing, increased client

functionality with HTML5 and increasing numbers

of mobile devices accessing the web. After

attending the 2009 conference, Elon University

changed the content and description of a junior level,

required Computer Science III course to be based on

enterprise programming using a PAAS Cloud. The

course has been successfully taught and continually

updated based on industry trends for the past three

years and has proven to be spot on in preparing the

students with the skills needed by employers as

shown in the IDC and IBM 2012 surveys and recent

data provided at the Google IO 2012 conference that

the App Engine cloud had 1,000,000 active

applications with over 7.5 billion page hits daily

(Magnusson, 2012).

The Elon Computer Science III course is a junior

level course and students entering the course have

already had two programming courses using Java SE

and are familiar with the Eclipse Interactive

Development Environment. The enterprise

programming course was designed to focus on the

most recent industry client standards of HTML, CSS

and JavaScript, the most recent Java EE 6

JavaServer Faces standard and the SQL standard for

creating, retrieving, updating and deleting data from

a persistent data store. Students learn how to

develop, test and debug on the cloud using three

separate processes representing the client process,

the server process and the datastore process. The use

of multiple languages and multiple processes is a

significant increase in complexity for the student.

PAAS allows the course to focus on development

and not on system administration and configuration.

3 PAAS HARDWARE

AND SOFTWARE

This section describes the goals, acquisition,

software, configuration and advantages of PAAS for

Computer Science III.

3.1 Goals

Elon University wanted to offer the previously

described course using state of the art software and

hardware. Elon University identified the following

goals for the platform:

1. The client process, server process and data store

process must run on different physical or virtual

machines. The client should have the latest

Firefox and Chrome browsers. The server should

support a fully compliant Java EE 6 Application

Server and the database should support the SQL

standard and be network accessible.

2. The software and hardware must be available

24x7 and accessible from both on an off campus

with no firewall restrictions.

3. The software must be pre-installed and not

require any installation, system administration or

configuration by the student or by the instructor.

4. The software must be widely used in industry

and recognized as an industry leader.

5. The ability to create user accounts for students

should be under the control of the faculty

member, easy to do with a short turnaround time

less than 24 hours from request to receipt of user

account.

6. Each student account should be in a sandbox and

not visible by other members of the class.

7. The IDE must be based on Eclipse and support

development, testing and deployment from

within the Eclipse environment.

8. The software and hardware must be free or at a

very low price.

For 2010 and 2011, the Google App Engine came

the closest to meeting all of these goals. It is a

superb PAAS offering and was very successfully

used in the Computer Science III course

(Hollingsworth, 2010). The only minor limitations

were:

1. It did not fully support Java EE 6. JavaServer

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Faces 2 (JSF) was not provided with App

Engine. However, there were workarounds that

allowed third party libraries to support most of

JSF 2. Threads were not supported.

2. It did not have free support for SQL but rather

supported an underlying NOSQL Google Big

Table database with a partially compliant JPA

1.0 interface.

3. The local testing environment was a subset of the

deployment environment. Students could have

code run in a local Jetty environment but fail

when deployed to App Engine.

Elon University would still be using App Engine

today if IBM did not provide us with a better PAAS

through the IBM Academic Initiative and the IBM

SmartCloud Enterprise in 2011. This environment

was successfully used in 2012 and fully meets all of

the course goals. The IBM environment will be the

focus for the remainder of this paper.

3.2 Acquisition

For many years, IBM has offered universities an

IBM Academic Initiative program that provides

access to download and freely use course materials

and software. Faculty can quickly register and gain

access through a simple online application. A

drawback of this program was that the faculty

member had to download, configure and administer

the software on university hardware. However,

starting in 2010 with 20 institutions and expanding

in 2012 to 80 institutions in 17 countries, IBM added

the ability through the Academic Initiative program

for faculty and students to gain access to the IBM

Academic Skills Cloud (IBMa, 2012). The

Academic Skills Cloud provides access to the IBM

SmartCloud Enterprise and allows faculty and

students to create virtual machine instances from

over 20 pre-configured IBM images running the

latest versions of IBM software such as Rational

Application Developer and WebSphere

In 2011, Elon University became part of the pilot

program on the IBM Academic Skills Cloud. After

using the Google App Engine PAAS for two years,

Elon faculty knew exactly what they wanted and

needed in a PAAS from IBM. The IBM Academic

Initiative Relationship Manager worked with Elon

faculty and had an IBM image created and

configured with the software needed to specifically

meet the goals of the Computer Science III course.

Elon faculty had the ability to use a simple IBM

SmartCloud Enterprise web form to request the

creation of a virtual machine instance of this image

running on the IBM cloud. Within minutes after

submission, the virtual machine is created. A key

aspect of the cloud instance is that the development

environment is on the cloud and the deployment

environment is on the cloud.

3.3 Virtual Machine Software

and Configuration

For the Computer Science III course, faculty

members created a separate, individual virtual

machine for each student on the cloud running

preconfigured software to provide a PAAS for

developing enterprise Java EE 6 applications. Each

student had their own machine IP address with

associated login and password for developing and

deploying enterprise web applications. All of the

needed course software was pre-installed and

configured to eliminate any need for software

installation or configuration by each student. Each

student’s virtual machine was identical so faculty

knew each machine was properly configured and

could focus on the application and not installation

related issues. The student could access the virtual

machine through Remote Desktop Connection, bring

up Rational Application Developer and immediately

start development. Remote Desktop Connection is a

software program that allows the students to access

and develop code on the cloud virtual machines with

the impression that they are developing on their own

computer. Remote Desktop Connection is free and

comes preinstalled on every Windows machine. For

Apple machines, Remote Desktop Connection is

automatically installed with Microsoft Office 2011

for Mac.

The IBM cloud offers a choice of a Linux or

Windows Virtual Machine. Elon chose a Windows

Virtual Machine since the Elon students were most

familiar with Windows and the ease of access to the

virtual machine using Remote Desktop Connection.

Each virtual machine has 60 gigabytes of disk space.

The software pre-installed on each machine included

DB2 Database, Derby Database, WebSphere

Application Server (WAS), Rational Application

Developer (RAD), and Firefox. The DB2 database

software and Derby database software fully support

SQL. The lightweight Derby database was the focus

in Computer Science III as it is simpler to use in

learning database skills. The DB2 database is

provided with the anticipation of using it in follow

up elective courses and student projects. The DB2

database automatically starts upon machine startup.

The Derby Database has a desktop shortcut for the

user to manually start. WebSphere is one of the

leading fully compliant Java EE 6 Application

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Servers. To get a sense for its industry acceptance,

there are more job opening requiring WebSphere

skills on Indeed.com as shown in Figure 1 for five

consecutive years than any other Java EE 6

application server (e.g. JBoss, WebLogic or App

Engine). WebSphere is installed to automatically

start at Windows start up. Rational Application

Developer is an Eclipse Based Interactive

Development Environment. For the second

consecutive year, it has been rated the Best Software

Development Platform in the annual Evans Data

Corporation survey (Taft, 2012). RAD is installed

and has a desktop shortcut for easy access. RAD has

been preconfigured to start up with the Java EE

perspective with two available WebSphere servers to

which RAD can deploy an enterprise application

project with a simple mouse click. One WebSphere

server is running on the current cloud virtual

machine. The other WebSphere server is running on

a course deployment machine in the cloud. Two

WebSphere servers were provided to give the

student the chance to develop and test locally and to

then deploy to a course deployment server. RAD has

had the data perspective configured with database

connections to a DB2 database and Derby database

on the same virtual machine and connections to a

DB2 database and Derby database on the course

deployment server. The preconfigured connections

facilitate the development and testing of SQL code

to create, read, update and delete tables.

3.4 Advantages

The IBM SmartCloud Enterprise PAAS provides the

course instructor and student with many advantages.

It provides free hardware and software and removes

the largest obstacle of cost reported in the IBM

survey. It does not require any software installation

or configuration which allows the student to focus

on the challenging task of learning enterprise

programming and not becoming frustrated with

many lost hours due to an IT configuration issue. It

is available 24x7 from on and off campus. Students

have their own virtual machine so any mistakes

made by others will not impact them and any

mistakes they make will not impact others. It is a

Windows virtual machine and when accessed from

Remote Desktop Connection will have the same

look, feel and familiarity of their own laptop. The

WAS Application Server and RAD IDE are industry

leaders. The RAD environment provides many

wizards, editing and development tools that aid a

student to develop code in SQL, HTML, CSS,

JavaScript and Java within a single IDE.

Figure 1: Current job postings for Java EE server skills.

4 CURRICULUM FORMAT

The course was a very fast paced course and covered

a lot of concepts and languages. The fall 2012

semester course was held three times a week for

approximately 14 weeks. The course was structured

into a client segment followed by a server segment

followed by a data persistency segment. The client

segment was the first one-sixth of the course (8

classes) and covered HTML 5, CSS and JavaScript.

The intent was to quickly cover these languages as

they would be re-used and reinforced during the

server segment of the course. The server segment

was the largest segment of the course and took the

next four-sixths of the course (20 classes). The

server segment covered JavaServer Faces and

Primefaces. The final segment for the last one-sixth

of the course (8 classes) was the data persistency

segment and covered database design and

programming using SQL and the JDBC API.

5 INSTRUCTOR TRAINING

According to the IBM Survey, the second leading

obstacle to introducing cloud computing is lack of

access to training. There are many sources of free

training available to faculty that can be subsequently

used to provide many of the student materials for a

course. This section discusses the free training

resources used by Elon faculty to learn the materials

to offer the class.

The client segment of the course consisted of

HTML, CSS and JavaScript. There are many free

web accessible resources available for learning these

technologies. Elon University has free access to

tutorials at Lynda.com. The faculty used three

videos titled “HTML Essential Training”, “CSS for

Developers” and “JavaScript Essential Training”

supplemented by tutorials at W3Schools on HTML,

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CSS and JavaScript to learn these languages. Each

of the video tutorials is approximately 5 hours in

length. If your university does not have access to

Lynda.com then you can take these three tutorials

using the free one week Lynda trial or pay 25 dollars

for a one month membership.

The server segment of the course, which is the

largest segment, highly leveraged the outstanding

tutorials provided by Marty Hall. Marty is the

president of a training and consulting company

focusing on Java EE, Rich Internet Applications and

Android Development (Hall, 2012). In this role,

Marty teaches on site courses around the world to

major corporate and government customers in many

disciplines (e.g. Energy, Healthcare, Finance, and

Automotive). Each year, he typically teaches at least

two courses on Java Server Faces and two courses

on JavaScript and Ajax Basics. Each course contains

a complete set of PowerPoint slides, Eclipse project

code of examples used in the slides, course

exercises, Eclipse course exercise solutions and links

to key JSF references. Marty makes all of this

material freely available to course instructors. After

each course presentation, Marty updates the

materials and format of the course to make it better.

Elon University faculty have used the continually

updated JSF and JavaScript course materials for

three years to learn JSF 2, Primefaces and

JavaScript. Marty’s code is extremely well written

and was ported to run in RAD and WebSphere

without any modifications.

The database segment of the course leveraged

the 14 article tutorial series on the Derby database

by Robert Brunner (Brunner, 2006). Each article in

the series contains downloadable code and builds off

previous articles. SQL is sequentially covered

starting with using it in Derby as a data definition

language to create tables to using it as a data

manipulation language for writing queries. After

covering SQL, Brunner discusses JDBC and the

design concepts of using a Data Access Object. The

JDBC section is nicely complemented by the

materials on “Accessing Databases with JDBC”

provided by Marty Hall as a module in

coreservlets.com’s Java 7 course. Two additional

web sites that proved valuable in learning SQL were

sqlzoo.net which has interactive tutorial exercises

and w3schools.com.

6 STUDENT MATERIALS

For the most part, the same materials used for

instructor training were used for student learning.

The first client segment of the course used the same

Lynda.com videos and on-line resources and was

supplemented by instructor developed PowerPoint

slides.

There is only one required text book for the

course. The text book is Core JavaServer Faces

Third Edition and is used for the second segment of

the course (Geary, 2010). The text book is superbly

complemented by the Marty Hall JSF slides. In fact,

in the Marty Hall on line references, he lists the Core

JavaServer Faces book as his favorite JSF reference.

The text book stresses good programming practices

and continually builds on previous practices in each

example. Instead of following the text book chapter

by chapter, Elon followed the topic order used by

Marty Hall in teaching his JSF 2 course and mapped

the reading assignments in the book to each topic.

The slides provided by Marty Hall were customized

and slightly enhanced for RAD and WAS.

The final database segment of the course used

the Derby tutorial series by Brunner which contained

14 articles and was supplemented by instructor

developed slides.

7 ASSESSEMENT

Each of the three course segments was assessed by a

comprehensive exam at the end of each segment and

with multiple homework assignments. The exam at

the end of each segment was developed in a

multiple-choice format similar to that used on

certification exams and comprehensively tested the

segment topics. During each segment, multiple

homework assignments were assigned. For each

segment, students used pairwise programming. Pairs

were randomly assigned for the segment and then

changed for the next segment. Pairwise

programming was not used in 2010 and 2011 but

was very successfully used in 2012 and proved to

increase productivity, increase quality, reduce

frustration, increase knowledge sharing, develop

interpersonal skills and increase confidence. Elon

has found pairwise programming to be extremely

beneficial in enterprise programming. The

complexity of developing in multiple languages and

multiple processes is significantly increased over

simple Java application development in Computer

Science I and Computer Science II. Pairwise

programming enabled students to more effectively

deal with the complexity. The average homework

assignment grade using pairwise programming

increased from 85 in 2011 to 91 in 2012.

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8 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

DIRECTIONS

Cloud based computing is rapidly being used

throughout industry and there is a current and

projected shortage of IT developers with cloud

computing skills. University computer science

curriculums need to provide cloud computing

courses to prepare graduates to enter the work place.

This paper described a required cloud based

enterprise programming course at Elon University

that used free cloud based software and hardware

and free training materials. This cloud based

development course provides an example that could

be immediately used at any university to give their

students the cloud based skills needed to be

successful in the IT market.

The computing field is extremely dynamic and

constantly undergoing rapid change. Elon University

will keep up with the rapid change by continually

monitoring the Google IO annual conference and

Industry trends to update the core Computer Science

III course and to use the core course as a building

block for new elective offerings. Near term

enhancements to the core course will be to use the

upcoming, 2013 Java EE 7 release which has an

upgrade to JSF to better support HTML 5. In

addition, an elective cloud computing course will be

offered in spring 2014 focused on HTML 5, Servlets

3.1, Restful Web Services and NOSQL data

persistence.

REFERENCES

Brunner, R. (2006) ‘Developing with Apache Derby’

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developerworks/opensource/library/os-ad-trifecta1/

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Hall, M. (2013) [Online] available from:

http://www.courses.coreservlets.com/about-instructor.

html. [Accessed 12.20.2012].

Helms, R. (2012) IT Workforce Can’t Meet Demand For

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