Here is my evaluation report for assignment 2 (.mov). Enjoy!
Below is a transcript:
In the second half of the subject we took our initial workshop learnings and put some more context around them, dealing with deployment, scalability, maintenance and configuration management. In the readings and exercises we put the pieces together, taking the individual technologies and starting to look at how they interface with each other to make web applications.
One of the themes that stood out for me was the fact that although there are many different technologies and solutions out there, but the basic paradigms are the same. With CORBA and RMI we saw different methods of doing what is essentially the same thing, and with the emergence of XML as a force, we can now abstract out the differences and leverage all kinds of functionality in new ways and contexts.
There is a flip side to this of course. Security and concurrency issues add layers of complexity to building and maintaining these applicaitons. And communicating amongst more people requires the better standards of modelling and documentation which UML brings.
As a user experience professional it has been great to get a better perspective on the possibilities for integration and use of existing systems in new ways. There is sure to be plenty of work in the next few years making these systems work for their users.
