Software engineering fundamentals and online learning resources

Software Engineering: What Makes it Run

The Software Engineering Online Learning Center sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) is a wealth of useful information for anyone interested in the disciplines this organization is committed to advancing knowledge in. Divided into webcasts, DB2 tutorials, Amazon.com and eBay tutorials, Java learning tools and Linux certification tutorials, the learning center strikes a good balance between open source and proprietary software. What makes the site especially useful is the successful use of IBM DB2 tutorials and free sample code downloadable for students. The IEEE has made working with its other partners a priority as well, as the content shows how effective this strategy has been. All the partnerships and content support the main purpose of the site, which is to provide students with both the deeply theoretical and practical, pragmatic insights necessary to excel in an engineering career. The pros or positive aspects of the site include the pervasive support and overview of open source technologies, the balanced approach it takes to IBM and other partners, and the ability to get to tutorials without having to go through a lengthy opt-in process. The cons or negatives are that there would be even more open source information available, including updates on the Linux distributions. There also could be more information on big data trends including Hadoop and MapReduce, and their implications on database architectures.

Discussion and Analysis

The use of XML in distributed networking environments where there are very large data sets present, for example in the use of Hadoop, MapReduce and other forms of data aggregation and analysis, is an emerging field that continues to show significant potential for software engineering and application development (Dominguez, Lloret, Perez, Rodriguez, Rubio, Zapata, 2011). Specifically looking at how to optimize the performance of XML networks where there are exceptionally large data sets designed using Hadoop, MapReduce and other big data oriented platforms is also critical for the long-term growth of enterprise software as well. At the center of the integration of XML protocols and schema and the big data sets based on Hadoop and MapReduce are the retrievability and reusability of taxonomies and query strings (Pal, Mitra, Kamps, 2011). This aspect of XML integration with large-scale data sets has major implications on how taxonomies can be streamlined, tailored to specific needs of smartphone and mobile device users as well (Gavalas, Economou, 2011). Initial test of these approaches to managing taxonomies with XML to preserve role-based queries show that this data format is slow and often cannot keep up with mobile traffic however (Tan, Liu, Wang, Shi, 2010). What is needed is a more streamlined approach to managing XML code consolidation and development. The IEEE site touches on this area yet doesn't provide insights into a thorough approach to managing and optimizing XML compression. This would have been useful as a video tutorial for example. The site does for example discuss using XML to model user requirements and create a more effective strategy for managing role-based access to data (Soares, Vrancken, Verbraeck, 2011). It however does not discuss how critical it is to be able to compress XML data streams and create a more effective transmission of data sets. This approach to creating high-bandwidth data transfer across XML network is critical for the growth of content-rich mobile platforms (Gavalas, Economou, 2011). The vision of being able to stream XML-encoded data to mobile devices in real-time while also ensuring data integrity and taxonomy-based role definition is possible. The IEEE provides useful references on the fundamentals of XML yet doesn't provide insights into how to make data taxonomies compressed enough to send over XML networks to mobile devices.

Links of Interest