Development of web services in academic environment

Abstract

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI--COLUMBIA AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] The rapid growth in the use of the World Wide Web (WWW) has been noted by many researchers and practitioners. Web services have become a powerful and irreplaceable tool to help us spread information and help companies to perform product promotion. Nowadays, web services are also a new tool in modern life to help people make work easier and live better. Website development is a growing aspect of Information Technology (IT) services within many organizations; however, the methodology in which website development actually takes place within organizations is still largely uncertain. Project managers and developers use methodology to guide development processes and manage projects. The methodology we chose should be efficient and effective within certain development environments. This thesis provides practical experience on web service development in an academic environment using the College of Engineering (COE) Grant Dashboard and COE Request System as examples. The COE Grant Dashboard is an ASP.NET website used to manage and statistically analyze records of research awards, expenditures, and proposals in the College of Engineering. The COE Request System is a full-stack Java workflow system which is used to submit and track all College of Engineering related requests. It replaces paper-requests by e-requests, largely speeds up the process of handling requests, and increases accuracy. These systems were developed from the beginning with no prior development. This thesis focuses on the practical methodology of building web services in the academic environment based on agile software development. Agile development offers the ability to improve software development outcomes. The results in this research show the effectiveness of the methodology after the successful development of the COE Grant Dashboard and the COE Request System. User requirement analysis, selection of programming languages and website frameworks, windows server setup, and many other items will be covered in thesis.