Ruth Cortez

E-Learning Computational Cloud (eLC2): Web Services Platform to Enhance Task Collaboration

A significant proportion of e-Learning services are delivered through Cloud Computing. These use Web services as an interface integrator to support communication across heterogeneous platforms over internet protocols. Similarly, a high level of task collaboration is needed to form an e-Learning community. Therefore, we propose an e-Learning Computational Cloud (eLC2) based on the Model-View-Controller design patterns paradigm. The reusable task objects collaborate in a Model that is wrapped inside the reconfigurable Controller which transforms the request/response parameters of the end user View to that of the Model. The eLC2 offers software development platform for e-Learning Task Management. The main deliverable of eLC2 is a Task as a Service which is decoupled from View as well as user session maintenance. It is directly exposed to external the e-Learning Cloud for scalability.

Enterprise Service Bus dependency injection on MVC design patterns

Paper deals with the design issues of an e-Learning Computational System based on a Task Management Model. One of the main components of the proposed e-Learning Computational Cloud is the Controller acting as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) for absolute Model abstraction from outside references. Simultaneously, View is completely decoupled from Model and ultimate privacy and security is achieved for the business data objects. This ESB bolstered with the Dependency Injection Pattern has reinforced protocol and message transformation, service loose coupling, global service contract, service implementation autonomy, service reusability, service modularity, statelessness and dynamic discoverability of the services. The ESB uses service virtualization that archives the services together as a single deployable unit which is managed by the Orchestration Engine as a central console. This allows the user to customize e-Learning Platforms by sourcing a diverse range of e-Learning services.

Developing Re-usable Components Based on the Virtual-MVC Design Pattern

In modern complex enterprise applications re-usability and interoperability of software components are of vital importance due to the increasing heterogeneous development platforms and variety of end user devices in which computational services need to be exposed. The need of code solutions re-usability led to the development of Design Patterns, which are means to encapsulate proven solutions to recurrent problems and they provide developers with a common language to abstract the logic encrypted under source code implementation structures. In this article we focus on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern. Although it represented a step forward for components re-usability, the model and view are still coupled compromising the business logic and introducing a degree of complexity for the applications development. We discuss two main variations of the MVC pattern that are aiming to complete decoupling of Model from View, as well as platforms supporting the development of MVC based applications. Our research is based on the original Virtual-MVC design pattern, in which we model the controller as middleware to achieve full decoupling of the model from view. Our main contribution is to demonstrate the development process of re-usable components in the framework of the V-MVC pattern, through a development platform that supports Virtual-MVC based applications.

Virtual model‐view‐controller design pattern: Extended MVC for service‐oriented architecture

In the framework of service-oriented architecture (SOA), the initial stage of application development is a complex task due to the upfront costs, software redesign, and specialized skills. The focus of this study is on the formalization of a virtual model-view-controller (Virtual-MVC) design pattern to simplify the development of service-oriented applications for medium and small-sized enterprises. The Virtual-MVC pattern facilitates the implementation of service-oriented applications by abstracting the complex integration logic and service interface design from the developers tasks. The main changes introduced by the Virtual-MVC pattern are the total decoupling of the View from the Model, whose links are reorganized within an enhanced Controller based on the enterprise service bus. The Controller is reinforced with dependency injection for service virtualization. In this paper, the description of a Virtual-MVC-based programming framework is formalized, and a standard functional classification of MVC-related patterns is proposed for comparison. The Virtual-MVC pattern is implemented into a software development framework, along with its corresponding programming strategy. The evaluation is performed through a study in a software engineering course at the University of Aizu, where services were designed following the Virtual-MVC programming approach. The results indicate a reduction of development complexity, while enforcing service design principles.

Task management principles for e-learning environments

This paper proposes the definition of a Task Management approach for e-Learning software components. The Task Management approach primary deals with subjects that require processing of mathematical expressions. We are exploring the strategy to collaborate components for automatic Task assignment with automatic Problem generation and the verification method. The support of the Task Management strategies in the framework of current systems, has limitations handling automatic verification of mathematical expressions. Therefore, our proposal is to elaborate the strategy for an enhanced Task Management system based on a Formula and Verification Engines that encapsulate the strategy; moreover, that can be integrated within a distributed development platform and exposed under Business-to-Client mode of communication. We describe the components and strategy to follow in further implementation for numerical and formula based Task Management e-Learning systems.

Automatic Glossing Services for E-learning Cloud Environments

In language learning scenarios, the use of glossing technique has a positive effect on incidental vocabulary acquisition as a by-product of reading. However, the preparation of materials that include glosses can be a time consuming task for the teacher. Automatic glossing tools have gained interest to help reduce such efforts, and to provide a better experience using electronic documents. Most glossing tools are still developed following a monolithic approach for a specific system or language due to its complexity. As e-Learning platforms are moving from monolithic applications to service based platforms suitable for Cloud environments, the tools as well should be designed following Service-Oriented principles. This work focuses on the design of automatic glossing services suitable for Cloud environments. The development follows an original Virtual-Model-View-Controller design pattern for the creation of loosely coupled components. The services are assembled in a web-based tool called Wiki Gloss. Wikipedia Miner is used to extract the content to feed the glosses from Wikipedia, taking advantage of the vast content and diversity of topics that are already available, as well as languages. This approach offers a potential reusability of services not only in diverse applications that can take advantage of glossing, but also provides the content in different languages.

Service oriented movie-based programming environment

Movie-based (MB) programming environment is a visual programming platform for creating algorithms and programs applying animation frames with computational and sensible operations. It facilitates the users understanding and debugging of a program by coloring correlated areas of structures, introducing appropriate computational formulas as well as specifying algorithmic and logical behavior of those areas. The goal of the presented work is adapting the current system to Service-oriented Architecture in order to organize a sharable storage and server-based execution of MB-programs and algorithms. Therefore, the MB-programs/algorithms could be shared and reused by different developers. In this paper, features of MB-programming paradigm and the corresponding software are presented, which are used to enhance capabilities for data/knowledge and execution management. In the framework of Virtual-MVC design pattern, the MB-management architecture, components design steps and a prototype of service-oriented MB-programming environment are discussed, including concepts and examples of usage.