Distributed Systems and Mobile Software Laboratory

During the coarse of the semester we investigate different distributed and mobile systems, then design and implement applications ont he different platforms.

COM/COM+

The goal of the lab is to teach students COM technology and COM+ services on a basic level. We use ATL to implement COM components and various client applications to access this COM server. Learning COM+ services is the second part of the lab where we use the previously created COM component and embed it in a COM+ application. Role based security is the major part of COM+ configuration on the lab which is achieved by built in OS tools.

 WCF

The lab is a introduction to the WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) technology. This is a .NET-based communication framework of  Microsoft. The lab shows many examples and covers the following topics: creating and hosting services, consuming services, configuration, serialization, threading, instancing, client callbacks, hosting in different process types.

Java EE

During the EJB measurement the students develop the business logic of a Java web application using stateless session beans and JPA entities. The solution makes use of the declarative transaction management feature of the EJB container. The first part of the measurement is common work with the leader of the measurement, the second part is independent work.

Mobil Java

During this laboratory work we introduce the platform basics, and we show examples for demonstrating the mobile application life cycle. This laboratory work covers designing and developing a simple user interface, implementing event handlers and dealing with user interface resources. In additon to that it shows the exception handling mechanishm and how to display messages to users efficiently. After that the objective also covers HTTP based communication where the students have to implement a REST client for a proper service. Therefore the basics of network communication will be also covered.

Android

Nowadays almost all mobile device support some kind of location based technology like GPS or cell based location. During this laboratory we introduce how location based services work on mobile devices and we demonstrate the new Location APIs. Besides that the laboratory work also covers how to display a map on the user interface and how to add simple markers to the map. The main objective is that the students have to implement a complex application that displays their current coordinates and their position to the map. The application allows to select contacts from the contact list, place them on a map and to display their distance from our current location.

iOS

This seassion aims to give an introduction to iOS programming by developing a mobile client to an online messaging system. The topics covered include the introduction to Xcode, user interfase basics, communication and map related features (MapKit).

Windows Phone

The goal of the session is to create a Windows Phone application capable of browsing and creating web stores. The students are introduced to Windows Phone programming, the basics of user interface creation and HTTP communication on mobile devices.