A Web Service-Oriented Approach to Teaching CS/IS1

Web services technology is a burgeoning technology that has received much attention in the software industry in recent years under the broader umbrella of service-oriented architecture (SOA). The popularity of the service-oriented paradigm is echoed by Microsoft's Bill Gates, where in a memo to Microsoft's top managers and engineers, he states "The broad and rich foundation of the internet will unleash a 'services wave' of applications and experiences available instantly over the internet to millions of users" [1]. While Web services have been incorporated in many industries in the market place, they are only beginning to appear in the academia, primarily in upper division and graduate CS/IS curricula [2,3]. In this special session, we share our belief that Web services technologies can and should be introduced early in CS/IS curricula. We describe and demo a number of scenarios that illustrate how Web services can be integrated into CS1/IS1 to make these courses more interesting and more importantly, make the students better prepared for upper division classes and for the industry upon graduation. This special session also shares the results of our preliminary findings involving the aforementioned integration and introduces participants to the related courseware. Participants will also receive hands-on experience with some of the scenarios experimented in our study. The intended audience is CS/IS educators who are interested in a novel way of teaching CS1/IS1. NOTE: Participants are encouraged to bring a laptop with wireless access to the Web and with NetBeans.