SUNIWE
 
 
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Construction

The Construction Phase was concerned with building the system ready for beta testing. The earlier phases had reduced the scope of the SURF implementation down to two uses cases which covered a lot of the features outlined in the original scenarios. The simpler use case had been realized in the Elaboration Phase so the Construction Phase involved realizing the remaining use case and preparing the WeTN development staff for their development activities. All major technical risks other than Shibboleth had been tackled in the first two phases so the construction work was straightforward. Shibboleth investigations continued throughout the Construction Phase.

The use case followed the same pattern of development which was:

  1. Use the fully described use case as the requirements definition to ensure that the focus of development is on implementing a feature of value to the Learner

  2. Develop the UPortal channel

    1. Storyboard the user interface to clarify look and feel, usability and navigation issues and to establish what UPortal channel screens and components will be required to realize the use case

    2. Design, develop and test the XML and Schema used to drive each UPortal channel screen

    3. Design, develop and test the XSL stylesheet used to determine the presentation of each channel screen

    4. Design, develop and test Java classes to handle data and rendering for the channel

    5. Deploy, test and refine the channel

  3. Develop the Web service

    1. Determine which IMS Enterprise Web Services operations to implement to support the use case

    2. Determine which IMS Enterprise Specification elements to use for wrapping the data output by the Web service

    3. Create a mapping between the data objects used within the SUNIWE web service implementation and their IMS Enterprise equivalents

    4. Develop SUNIWE classes to store and output data from the database

    5. Develop SUNIWE to IMS Enterprise transformation classes to convert between SUNIWE data objects and IMS Enterprise representations

    6. Create database views against which SQL calls can be made to provide the data for the Web service

    7. Modify the IMS classes to hand off implementation of operations to SUNIWE classes

    8. Develop the SUNIWE classes to implement the Web service operations

    9. Deploy, test and refine the Web service

The channel and Web service development tasks were again tackled independently. This allowed multiple developers to work concurrently with the outputs brought together when all tasks were completed. As before, storyboarding the UPortal channel screens and labelling all the screens and screen components consistently was essential to allow this division of labour to work. The channel development could be split between the roles of Java developer and user interface (UI) developer. The Java developer would develop the channel controlling and rendering classes. The UI developer would develop the XSL stylesheets.