NJIT School of Management

MIS-360-002

Survey of E-Commerce Tools & Technologies

Locations: Class: KUPF 110, Lab: LIBR 3042, Online: http://webct.njit.edu/

Instructor: Stephane Gagnon

Office Hours: Monday & Wednesday 11:30am-12:00pm

Office: Central Avenue Building, Room 4013

Telephone: 973-596-8569, Fax: 973-596-3074

Email: gagnon@njit.edu

(Taken from the NJIT Course Catalog: http://catalog.njit.edu/courses/mis.php#mis360)

Covers the current technologies behind e-commerce solutions such as dynamic Web sites, database integration, server-side scripting, client-side scripting, and XML.

Prerequisites

MIS 245/6 (or equivalents in BS CS/CT/IS/IT)

Outline

This course is a hands-on introduction to e-commerce and e-business technologies. Our sessions are a combination of half classes and half labs. Students will learn general principles in using web technologies for application development and enterprise systems integration, while developing valuable skills in growing demand.

We will focus on programming database-driven web sites, but we will not necessarily learn a new “language”. To simplify our work, we will use the Model Driven Architecture (MDA), a standard developed by the Object Management Group (OMG). See http://www.omg.org/mda for details.

One of the most valuable features of MDA is that it allows developers to transform Unified Modeling Language (UML) models and automatically produce nearly 95% of the code for various languages, among others Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). The compiled code is then automatically deployed in a server to test the application.

Students will use an enterprise-class development platform, OptimalJ 4.0 Architecture Edition, provided by Compuware, a leading software company based in Detroit, MI. Optimalj (OJ 4.0) is one of the most innovative tools using the MDA for J2EE. See the Compuware University Program http://javacentral.compuware.com/ for details. The software and learning material is provided for free by Compuware with an educational license of 6 months.

Learning Outcomes

After this course, you should be able to:

1. Understand the underlying technologies of a database-driven web application.
2. Understand the impact of MDA on development productivity and quality.
3. Use an MDA Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to build web sites.
4. Implement project specifications into UML and transform-deploy-test the app.
5. Use the MDA to implement a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Required Books

Students are not required to purchase textbooks as all material is provided for free in PDF formats. The 5 following PDF texts are available on our download page (see Schedule and Downloads further below):

• OJ Foundation: Used as weekly readings, contains 10 modules (1-7+A-B-C).
• OJ Exercises: Used as detailed instructions for labs, 4 exercises per module.
• OJ Tutorials: Used for labs and to help students practice complex tasks.
• OJ Guide: Used to understand the components and functions of the IDE.
• OJ Reference: Used to analyze error messages and learn formal functions.

In addition, the software and sample code will be available along with PPTs and PDFs.

Recommended Books

For those seeking a professional specialization on MDA, we recommend the following books available in the NJIT Library:

• Lano, K., 2005, Advanced systems design with Java, UML, and MDA, Amsterdam; Boston: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, 378 pages, ISBN: 0750664967

• Mellor, Stephen J., 2004, MDA distilled principles of model-driven architecture, Boston: Addison-Wesley, 150 pages, ISBN: 0201788918

• Frankel, David, 2003, Model driven architecture: applying MDA to enterprise computing, New York: Wiley, 328 pages, ISBN: 0471319201

Grading

The final grade (on 100%) is the sum of the 4 following grades. Please see further below for instructions on each activity. Cut-off points for numeric-to-alpha grades are: A = 100-90, B+ = 80-89, B = 70-79, C+ = 60-69, C = 55-59, D = 50-54, F = 0-49.

Schedule and Downloads

Please obtain all our material on our download site, http://web.njit.edu/~gagnon/material, where you can login using the username/password sent by email. The material will also be available for copy and/or CD burning in our lab.

Quizzes

1. The instructor will hold a brief 5-minutes quiz every Monday at 10:05am.
2. There will not be any make-up assignments/exams for quizzes missed
3. A single open-ended question will be formulated on the material of the day.
4. Students are required to answer this question within 1 single-sided page.
5. The primary grading criteria will be to answer precisely as per material.

Class Discussions

1. On Mondays, around 10:45am and following the instructor’s lecture, each team will take turns and lead each one a 10-minutes class discussion on the weekly exercise they have been assigned (total of 40 minutes of our class).
2. All students are required to read exercises prior to that discussion and to actively formulate questions or comments during the lab preparation.
3. These discussions will take the form of a walkthrough of all lab instructions, and a discussion of the new OJ functionality introduced that week.
4. Students are expected to have tried/practiced exercises on OJ before class.
5. The primary grading criteria will be the relevance and usefulness of discussions for the upcoming lab execution that same week.

Lab Execution

1. Each Wednesday around 10:05am we will hold a session in lab LIBR 3042.
2. Each team will take turns and lead the line-by-line execution of their exercise.
3. Teams should properly orchestrate their efforts to have 1 presenter (who will sit at the instructor’s workstation to run the projector), 1 support person who will troubleshoot any issues privately when someone falls behind (while the whole class continues without waiting for that person), and 1 grader who will work with the instructor in assessing to what extent their classmates have performed in executing the lab exercise.
4. Each exercise should last at most 20 minutes. All teams are therefore expected to have practiced the exercise on their own prior to the lab session, so as to ensure its success.
5. The primary grading criteria for all teams will be the efforts deployed in learning as much as possible of the exercise instructions (not necessarily completing them all a 100%, which will vary greatly every week as each exercise proposes different challenges).

Project Deliverables

1. Each team will be responsible to perform a development project using OJ. The goal is to apply their class and lab learning by producing small deliverables every week to complete the project.
2. The requirements are to conceive, model, implement and test a simple database-driven and workflow-driven web application for a typical bookstore.
3. The application should include a book catalog with keyword search and category browsing, a customer profile, a shopping cart, a shipment tracking page, and an administration interface. All these functions should be integrated in a single application, and should make use as much as possible of workflows where various roles interact along a process, such as customers, customer service representatives, shipment companies, and administrators. The application should also make use of Amazon and/or eBay web services, or any other web services available, to produce its catalog based on keywords.
4. Teams are welcomed to show their weekly deliverables at any time throughout the semester, but the final version of their small deliverables should be available at the latest the Monday following the week the lab was taken. This effort is required mainly to ensure students keep a constant development rate. While deliverables should be handed-in and graded every week, once graded teams are free to modify it or redo it entirely at any time during the semester. There will not be any revisions or extras to the grade of each deliverable.
5. The primary grading criteria will be the creativity and rigor with which teams will have conceived and modeled their application. Depending on the performance of the whole class, we may consider as criteria the degree to which teams have been able to implement and test it using MDA in OJ.

Course Rules

1. The NJIT Honor Code will be upheld, and any violations will be brought to the immediate attention of the Dean of Students. Please carefully read the honor code at http://www.njit.edu/academics/honorcode.php.
2. Students will be consulted with by the instructor to reach an agreement on any modifications or deviations from the syllabus throughout the course of the semester. Consultations will take place first by email, as well as through messages posted on our course WebCT Bulletin Board under the “Main” section.
3. Before visiting the instructor during office hours, it is always appreciated if students arrange for an appointment by sending an email. Students with an appointment will always have priority.
4. Students wishing to make a phone appointment with the instructor should formulate their questions in an email first as it may be possible to resolve it with an email reply. If they wish they can provide some times of availability with the proper telephone numbers to call them. The instructor will call them at their convenience, from Monday to Friday 11:30am-5pm. It is preferable not to leave a voice mail as email is fastest and keeps a clear record/thread of the request. All emails are treated in full confidentiality. It is best to use the WebCT email system to keep emails in the same record/thread.
5. The normal turn-around time for activities and deliverables to be graded and returned is two weeks after submission. A special report card will be sent to each students to sum up all activities until week 6, ensuring they get a preliminary grade before the last date of withdrawal (Monday, March 6, 2006, or week 8).

Academic Calendar

Downloaded from the NJIT Registrar website at http://www.njit.edu/v2/Registrar/Calendar/2006sp.html on 01/12/06, which was updated on 12/05/05.