Web Services Architecture for Deployment of Online Courses On Healthcare Software Design, Integration and Development

For the teaching and assessment of a course on software programming it is very much required to illustrate the dynamic interaction of the various modules of a given program. In this paper we show how the Web Services technology is used to incorporate this dynamic interchange in the setup and execution of the various modules of a large-scale software project. Both the competing web service technologies - Java Web Services Developers Pack (JWSDP) and Microsoft .NET were employed to not only test their applicability for pedagogical purposes but also to evaluate their ease of installation, programming and usage by the student users in the course. It essentially involved the integration of the web services architecture into the lesson delivery and assessment structure of the course. In using example applications of database interconnectivity and enterprise wide search engine, the project serves as an excellent tool for the students not only as a teaching exercise in the classroom but also as an illustration of new aspects of information systems design and integration