Upcoming Schedule : FYP

Our final year project CS4200 has the below upcoming milestones.

• April 30th, 2010 - Beginning of Semester 2: Submission of research papers or extended abstracts to ERU
• Last week of April - meeting with English editor
• May 16th to 21st - Submission of final draft report to Moodle and supervisors
• May 27th 2010: approval of the projects by the supervisors for final evaluations
• 3rd & 4th June 2010 - mid of semester 2: Final evaluations - presentations, demonstrations & vivas
• 2nd week of June 2010: Project demonstration in the Exhibition
• 24th June 2010: Submission of final report (hard bound) and project CD/DVD.
• 24th June 2010: Submission of final versions of research papers

The final year project will continue till the mid of the semester 2, which is the final semester of our university life.


-- Project timeline updated as on 19th of June. --

• 21st, 23rd & 24th June 2010 - mid of semester 2: Final evaluations - presentations, demonstrations & vivas
• Project demonstration in the Exhibition - in place of this we may arrange a public demonstration and invite the industry to evaluate (but no plans yet)
• 23rd July 2010: Submission of final report (hard bound) and project CD/DVD. CD/DVD should contain all project documents including the final report and project web, source code, 10-minute video of the project, 1-minute video of the project, and any other item necessary for a future project group to continue the project.
• 23rd July 2010: Submission of final versions of research papers.

xOA and SOA++

Have you ever come across acronyms such as WOA, ROA, ..? Since the success story of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), many researchers and young enthusiasts have been trying to find more xOA (-Oriented Architectures) that can take SOA a step further (or claim to do so, at least in theory). Here I try to list some of those xOAs. Most of them (WOA, XOA, UOA ..) promise to take SOA to a level higher, or try to pose as an alternative or competitor to SOA.

Just go through these links and have some fun.

AOA (Agent Oriented Architecture)
BOA (Business Oriented Architecture)
COA (Collaboration Oriented Architecture)
DOA (Delegation Oriented Architecture)
EOA (Ecosystem Oriented Architecture)
FOA (Federation Oriented Architecture)
GOA (Goal Oriented Architecture)
HOA (Human Oriented Architecture)
IOA (Information Oriented Architecture)
MOA (Model Oriented Architecure)
POA (Process Oriented Architecture)
ROA (Resource Oriented Architecture)
SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)
UOA (User Oriented Architecture)
VOA (Virtualization Oriented Architecture)
WOA (Web Oriented Architecture)
XOA (Experience Oriented Architecture)

Pls note that there may be some alternative definitions for some of these acronyms as well.

Install *this* font before reading!

Recently I was going through the online version of the teachers' guides from the National Institute of Education Sri Lanka (NIE). The major issue I noticed in those documents was, they have been written using non-unicode fonts (Sinhala - DL-Manel-bold and Tamil - Bamini). It should be noted that converting them to unicode is not very difficult given the UCSC converters. However the practical difficulty of using non-unicode fonts to the shared documents is, the other users are expected to have that particular font in their system. Copy-pasting into a plain text editor becomes impossible. Still I have seen many web sites asking to download the particular font to view their site correct. Some sites even ask the users to use Internet Explorer or some other specific browser. I would rather request them to change their site to unicode than asking each user to install their not-so-sexy font.

Here is a sample of the above mentioned issue.
mEka Odjlh - Written using DL-Manel-bold, which appears as garbage text here.
පෑන් ධාවකය - After converting to Unicode using the UCSC Font converter.

Similarly for Tamil
Ngid nrYj;jp - Bamini
பேனை செலுத்தி - After converting to Unicode using the UCSC Font converter.

I could also notice during the recent series of IT seminars in Jaffna peninsula, that the students who mentioned that they can type in Tamil were actually referring to their ability of typing using Bamini font. I guess we have created an awareness of Unicode among them. Unicode is much essential, if we really want to go beyond mere typing in local languages.

CSE - IT Awareness Seminar Series

The CSE IT Awareness program by the Computer Science & Engineering Department of University of Moratuwa went quite successful, with 11 seminars all over the island in Tamil and Sinhala media. Final year undergraduates of the department along with a staff member visited the destinations and carried out the seminars. The seminars held at the 11 schools went quite well. I joined the team which went to the Jaffna peninsula, where we conducted the seminars in Tamil medium in 6 schools - Putthur Somaskandha College, Kopay Christian College, Kokuvil Hindu College, St. Charles M.V, Urumpurai Siva Tamil M.V, and Chullipuram Victoria College. I did my talk on இணையம் (The Internet). A handout was also distributed among the participants as a supportive learning material.

It was really nice to see the students showing a great interest in learning new technologies. It is our responsibility to make the country an IT hub through similar workshops and seminars. Information Communication Technology (ICT) is offered as an optional subject for Ordinary Level Students where they  also have the option of doing Agriculture or some other subjects instead. What I could notice it, the number of students doing ICT is much lower than the students choosing other modules. The reasons may be the score - They may feel ICT as a difficult subject, or there may be some limitations due to the limited resources. Obviously not all the schools are ready to have ICT as a compulsory module. More resources are needed. It should also be noted that GIT is yet another module provided for the Advanced Level students.

A seminar of three hours can never cover all the necessary stuff as a basic course. But it can provide a flavor to the students and make them more interested towards learning computer science and IT. I am pretty sure we have reached this goal. The interest  was shown very clearly by the students. Now we have to go forward carefully with the success of this initial attempt.

Given below is a short video capture of a drama practice of the students of Chullipuram Victoria College, which we were able to witness during our visit. :)

[GSoC 2010] Alternative Presentation Layer for OGSA-DAI

Having the vision of sharing data resources to enable collaboration, Open Grid Services Architecture Data Access and Integration (OGSA-DAI) provides access, transformation, integration, and delivery of data. It supports Apache Axis 1.4 and Globus Toolkit (gt-4.2), available to download for both the two platforms.
 
Under Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII-UK), an alternative presentation layer using Apache CXF instead of the outdated Axis which is currently used, is discussed as a project for Google Summer of Codes 2010, which I found very interesting for this summer.  

Project Proposal

Project Mentor: Ally Hume

OGSA-DAI has a layered architecture consists of the data layer, business logic layer, presentation layer, and client layer, when considering the architecture in bottom-up. Presentation layer encapsulates the required functionalities to expose the data service resources using the web service interfaces. Presentation layer currently consists of two realization, where each of them have  a WSDL that describes the interface. 

Both the realizations are compliant with Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF), and communicate with the respective client stubs using SOAP over HTTP. Hence design and implementation of an alternative RESTful presentation layer using CXF JAX-RS (The Java API for RESTful Web Services) is also included in this project, as it will be lightweight and best for bespoke clients.

This seems an interesting initiative as the performance and the simplicity will be highly improved. I have seen reasonable comparison of Axis 2 and CXF [1], [2], though they must be outdated by this time.

[1] Technical Notes on OGSA-DAI
[2] Resource on writing a presentation layer
[3] OGSA-DAI Tutorial
[4] FAQ: OGSA-DAI WSI-specific (Based on Axis 1.4 web service stack)
[5] FAQ: OGSA-DAI WSRF-specific (Based on the globus toolkit)
[6] General FAQ
[7] Known Problems
[8] Binary Transfer Benchmarks 
[9] GSoC 2010 Announcement in OGSA-DAI blog
[10] Google Summer of Code 2010 site