Improving coursework for Web Engineering based on MVC pattern

Yun, Seokchan and Kim, Sunghun and Kim, Hong-Gee (2009) Improving coursework for Web Engineering based on MVC pattern. In: Proceedings of the WebSci'09: Society On-Line, 18-20 March 2009, Athens, Greece. (In Press)

Recently, there have been tremendous changes in web engineering with adoption of Web 2.0 technologies such as front-end applications; rapid application development based on lightweight framework and service platform models by open APIs.

However, college course works for web engineering do not cover these changes, while most of them tend to be focused on HTML and form processing with database or learning specific languages (e.g. PHP, Java). These lead to that many students lose their interests and they do not recognize a novel method for web develpment, although there exist remarkable importance of web engineering.

To solve these limitations, we develop web engineering coursework 1) applying MVC (model, view and controller) framework to both server-side and front-side web technologies, 2) using lightweight framework for rapid application development (e.g. CakePHP, Ruby on Rails), and 3) using database-less programming approach with open APIs. A proposed coursework was experimented for junior students, majored in computer engineering at both Yabian University of Science and Technology, China in 2007 and Jeju National University, Korea in 2008.

As a result, most of students could understand conventional MVC patterns can be applied in whole processes of web applications both server and client side. They could approach to more methodological web programming in comparison of conventional ones and understood the importance of emerging front-end technologies and are initial motivated studying web engineering furthermore.

We found out this approach increase motivation and satisfaction of students significantly. In future, we will extend this approach to develop an independent course-ware of web engineering for students, making up of modeling, implementation and qualifying web applications as well as this kind of entrance coursework motivating them.

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(from http://journal.webscience.org/239/)