Interesting discussion on TSS

Hi All,

here is an interesting discussion at TSS about Java
and Teaching/Learning:

Discussion:
http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=21560&article_count=40

My opinion (NetBeans and EJOSA Template):
http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=21560&article_count=40#96514

(or see below)

Regards,
-- 
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Blasius Lofi Dewanto
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OpenUSS - Open University Support System
http://openuss.sourceforge.net
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E-Mail   : [email protected]
ICQ      : 39343280
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Indeed, this is quite interesting

At University of Muenster (Department of Business Informatics and 
Controlling, Germany) I teach and conduct graduate students for doing 
their software projects. Yes, they have to make a practical software 
development project to finish their study. Most of them have heard some 
lectures about Software Engineering and Java. Some of them are already 
working in companies as Java developers (plain Java, without J2EE). All 
the projects I conduct are about building real world J2EE applications 
and most of them don't have any experience with J2EE.

For this purpose I build the so called EJOSA Template (Enterprise Java 
Open Source Architecture), which offers a fully-fledged template based 
Open Source J2EE development environment with Ant. Important principles 
in EJOSA Template:
- KISS (Keep It Short and Simple). Install JDK, install NetBeans and 
unzip the ejosa.zip and you have everything you need with you.
- No wizards, understand the process. At the end we want to have capable 
students, which do not only understand wizards and drag&drop but really 
understand the underlying development process.
- Fast prototyping but the code must be maintainable and scalable. This 
is important because we want to reuse the code for our university's 
projects. Therefore we need to have a good structure.

I choose following Open Source products because of KISS principle:
- EJOSA Template is fully independent of IDE but I always tell them to 
use NetBeans. Mount your project directory and use F6 to run every ant 
scripts (build app and execute app).
- JOnAS for EJB container because of its very good documentation.
- Enhydra + XMLC, because easy to handle: Normal HTML files + id => Flow 
of the application.

EJOSA Template also integrates many other OS-Java libs (XDoclet, 
Velocity, etc.), but it's not a must to use every single libs.

So, with EJOSA Template + NetBeans I can offer them a ready to use 
Development Environment. Without this, you are lost in Java space! For 
more info about EJOSA Template (LGPL):
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ejosa/ejosa1.3.5-doc.pdf?download

I tend to see 2 different groups of students:
1) Students with very minimal Java knowledge. With this type of 
students, it's very easy to handle the project. Introduction to UML, 
introduction to general J2EE, introduction to EJOSA Template (NetBeans, 
CVS, examples), that's it, the project can begin. We discuss many things 
just through the project mailinglist. This type of students tend to 
follow the process, concentrate on the application problem and can 
finish the project successfully on time.

2) Students with good until very good Java knowledge (with some J2EE 
knowhow). They tend to work in their own way. So, they try to make some 
improvements into EJOSA Template like:
- I want to use Eclipse instead of NetBeans...
- I want to use JBoss instead of JOnAS, etc...
So, they are sometimes stuck into the Java technology details and forget 
what the real problem is. Surely they also finish the project at the 
end, but they sometimes need more time. On the other side this is good 
for EJOSA Template, because it will be improved by them

IMO, the success of such a student project depends also on you as tutor. 
Just saying: allright, you should use J2EE and Hibernate to implement 
your J2EE application will not help them (yes, I've done this and had a 
bad experience with this).

Anyway, creativity and freedom are important but you should show them 
the way...

Lofi.
http://www.openuss.org