INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN

FOR JAVA ENTERPRISE COMPONENT TECHNOLOGY

Marco Marcellis, Ella Roubtsova and Bert Hoogveld

Open University of the Netherlands,PO 2960, 6401 DL, Heerlen, The Netherlands

Keywords:

Component technology, Enterprise applications, Requirements, Instruction design, Teaching.

Abstract:

We present a method for development of instructions for teaching component based development of enterprise

application. The method considers development of an enterprise application as a complex task that has to be

taught as a whole. The requirements to the user access and to the back-end systems serve as a natural means for

the choice of the leaning tasks. We have ﬁxed the back-end system and separated the task classes based on the

requirements to the user access: a web-browser and an application client. Inside of each of those task classes

the requirements are decomposed into ”create”, ”retrieve”, ”update” and ”remove” groups of functionality.

Each of these functionalities can be seen as a simple enterprise application. Each of functionalities can be

of different level of complexity and may be implemented with local and remote clients and different types of

components. The Java enterprise component technology is used for implementation of learning tasks.

1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, almost any business role needs an enter-

prise application and the growing request for creat-

ing of such applications is supported by component

technologies. Those technologies provide typical ser-

vices used by enterprise applications and prefabri-

cated component types for application design. For

example, the Java EE technology offers several re-

lated component models, like the EJB 3.0 (Sriganesh

et al., 2006) model for the server side components

with the corresponding application servers, and the

servlet technology (J2EE, 2009) for the server side

components. There are also Integrated Development

Environments (IDE) like NetBeans (NetBeans IDE,

2009), providing the infrastructure and wizards for

custom deployment of components from given com-

ponent types.

The process of developmentof an enterprise appli-

cation consists of steps for creating three closely in-

terrelated layers of an enterprise application, namely,

a layer connecting the system with the database, a

layer that presents the business logic of an enterprise

and the client layer (Figure 1). Filling in those layers

with the components and the glue code, so that the

components communicate and their composition as a

whole has the required functionality, is the task of the

developer. Although IDEs offer automation for de-

sign of different layers, the choice of necessary com-

ponents and the glue code is to be done by the de-

signer who should take into account the requirements

to the complete enterprise system, use his knowledge

of the component model and interface based compo-

nent paradigm. This process of choices may become

difﬁcult because the available tutorials in this area

usually focus on speciﬁc types of components, train

isolated parts of the whole process and do not help

to reach integrated objectives. It is usually called the

”transfer paradox” (Merrill, 2002). Therefore, from

the teaching perspective the component based devel-

opment of an enterprise application is considered as a

complex task that has to be taught as a whole.

In this paper we present a method for development

of instructions for teaching component based devel-

opment of enterprise application. The method ap-

plies the approach for development of effective learn-

ing material for complex tasks called Four Compo-

nent Instructional Design model (van Merrienboer

and Kirchner, 2007). The requirements to the user

access and to the back-end systems serve as a natural

means for the choice the leaning tasks. The exercises

inside of task classes are decomposed into ”create”,

”retrieve”, ”update” and ”remove” groups of func-

tionality. The Java enterprise component technology

is used for implementation of learning tasks.

The structure of the paper is the following. Sec-

tion 2 presents the approach for development of ef-

fective learning material for complex tasks. Section 3

420

Marcellis M., Roubtsova E. and Hoogveld B. (2009).

INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN FOR JAVA ENTERPRISE COMPONENT TECHNOLOGY.

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Information Systems Analysis and Speciﬁcation, pages

420-422

DOI: 10.5220/0002153804200422

 SciTePress

describes how this method is applied to design of in-

structions for teaching of component based develop-

ment of enterprise applications. Section 4 draws con-

clusions.

2 DESIGN OF INSTRUCTIONS

FOR LEANING OF COMPLEX

TASKS

One of the most successful approaches for develop-

ment of effective learning material for complex tasks

is the approach called Four Component Instructional

Design model (for short, 4C/ID-model) (van Merrien-

boer and Kirchner, 2007). The 4D/ID model is a

holistic design approach opposite to an atomistic one.

Atomistic approaches reduce a complex task to sim-

pler elements that can be presented to students and

trained. These approaches work good if the leaning

tasks have few interaction. The atomistic approaches

do not work for teaching if the elements of the learn-

ing task are closely interrelated. The 4D/ID model

deals with complexity of the learning tasks without

loosing of separate elements and the interconnections

between those elements. A task given to students al-

ways presents a complete complex task but the com-

plex tasks may be of different level of complexity.

The 4D/ID approach proposes to choose the criteria

and classify a set of compete complex learning tasks

of different complexity. Each learning task can have

several exercises. Some of the exercises have to be

used as demonstrations, other - as partial demonstra-

tions and should be ﬁnished by the students. The ﬁnal

exercises should be fulﬁlled by the students indepen-

dently. This classiﬁcation forms a training blue print

that can be ﬁlled in with different learning tasks.

Applying holistic approaches in education allows

solving the problem of fragmentation of knowledge.

In the case of teaching of development of enterprise

application the holistic approach prevents the situa-

tion when a student knows how to build one layer but

cannot integrate it with the interrelated layers of the

designed enterprise application. This approach also

preventsthe situation when a student cannot extend an

enterprise application to met new requirements. Us-

ing an integrated list of leaning objectives for each of

instructions allows students to overcome the ”transfer

paradox”.

3 DESIGN OF INSTRUCTIONS

FOR LEANING OF

COMPONENT BASED

DEVELOPMENT OF

ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS

The criteria of separation of learning tasks depend on

the domain of complex tasks. For the development

of enterprise applications the requirements to the user

access and to the back-end systems serve as a natural

means for the choice the leaning tasks. We have ﬁxed

the back-end system and separated the task classes

based on the requirements to the user access: a web-

browser and an application client (Figure 1). Inside

of each of those task classes the requirements are de-

composed into ”create”, ”retrieve”, ”update” and ”re-

move” groups of functionality. Each of these func-

tionalities can be seen as a simple enterprise applica-

tion. Each of functionalities can be of different level

of complexity and may be implemented with local and

remote clients and different types of Enterprise Java

Beans (stateless and stateful session beans or message

beans). The complexity of the business logic com-

ponent and the number of middelware services and

classes used for connection with the database grows

if the implementation goes from the ”retrieve” to ”up-

date”, ”create” and ”delete” functionality. So, the im-

plementations of standard functionality are the natural

candidates for the exercises within one task class.

Figure 1: Layers of enterprise applications and learning task

classes.

The exercise for implementation of the ”retrieve”

functionality is used as demonstration. It is shown

as a grey box in Figure 2. The creative processes

of relating requirements to the underlying business

model and databases and modelling an application in

terms of the component model are demonstrated to

INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN FOR JAVA ENTERPRISE COMPONENT TECHNOLOGY

421

deleteretrieve create

update

Task class 1

“Web-browser access”

…

deleteretrieve create

update

Task class 2

“Application client”

…

Figure 2: Learning task classes and exercises

the students as supportive material. The implemen-

tation of the ”update” and ”create” is partially sup-

ported and have to be ﬁnished by students. These ex-

ercises are shown as partially grey boxes in Figure 2.

The ”delete” functionality is fulﬁlled by the students

independently. The box representing this exercise in

Figure 2 is not coloured. From the outside, the com-

plexity of a learning task is measured by the complex-

ity of the functionality provided by the enterprise as

demanded. From the inside, the complexity is deﬁned

by the number of services and techniques used to im-

plement this functionality. So, the learning of compo-

nent paradigm is built into the exercises of different

complexity in each of the tasks of development of an

enterprise application.

4 CONCLUSIONS

It is known that the holistic design of leaning tasks

may simulate creating by students general cognitive

schemes about the domain. When the students face

with the similar tasks containing unfamiliar aspects

they easily ﬁnd solutions of those aspects (van Mer-

rienboer and Kirchner, 2007). So, design of effective

instructions in the area of development of enterprise

applications should give students more skills and con-

ﬁdence.

We have applied the 4C/ID method of instruc-

tional design to the course Component based devel-

opment. The application has shown that 70% of

the students achieve the necessary skills fulﬁlling the

three mentioned exercises and can independently im-

plement the fourth exercise. After the training those

students implement another enterprise application in-

dependently. For the 30% of students who need

more training, an open electronic course may improve

their training. As future work we are going to ex-

tend the set of learning tasks including the applica-

tions with business-to-business communication (Task

3, Figure 1).

REFERENCES

J2EE (2009). http://java.sun.com/products/servlet.

Merrill, M. (2002). First principles of instruction. Ed-

ucational Technology, Research and Development,

50(3):43–59.

NetBeans IDE (2009). http://www.netbeans.org/.

Sriganesh, R., G.Brose, and M.Silverman (2006). Master-

ing enterprise javabeans 3.0. Wiley.

van Merrienboer, J. and Kirchner, P. (2007). Ten Steps to

Complex Learning. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,

Publishers, London.

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