SOFTWARE ENGINEERING INTERNS DESIGN ELATED

Ten students from five ACS institutions and one NITLE Southern Region institution participated in the second annual summer Software Engineering Internship at the ACS Technology Center. (See appendix for a list of participating students and faculty.) The 2004 ACS Software Engineering program began with a 5-week intensive curriculum covering a number of key topics in software development, including building web applications in Java, software testing using JUnit, database design, the Unified Modeling Language, and--most importantly--the Extreme Programming (XP) methodology, which was used throughout the 9-week program. Starting in week 3, students began work on the actual software product--later named ELATED--which is a web-based program for managing collections of digital media files.

Following the XP methodology, student programmers worked in pairs and rotated tasks so that all team members had the opportunity to work on each aspect of their project. In addition, they conducted regular XP "stand-up" meetings, where architecture and design were discussed, and prepared client presentations for on-site contact with clients.

The resulting software product, named ELATED, reflects the quality and commitment of the student and faculty participants. ELATED is a general-purpose, web-based application for managing digital media files. ELATED is built on top of the Fedora Repository system (http://fedora.info), an open-source Mellon-sponsored project to build technology for the next-generation of digital libraries. An important goal of the ELATED software was to simplify access to and use of Fedora, which is more a framework than an end-user product. The intended impact of ELATED is to allow Fedora to be more easily integrated into the IT infrastructure at small institutions, while storing data in a manner consistent with the long-term vision of the Fedora project. The ELATED software is distributed through SourceForge, and is available at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/elated. It has been downloaded a number of times and praised by Fedora developers and is currently being piloted at Rhodes College and Hamilton College.

This internship program has two major goals: creating software for the ACS consortium and providing applied programming experience to students. The 2004 internship succeeded in both areas. As one intern explains, "It was great to have hands-on experience with coding because we aren't able to do a lot of that in class. It was especially beneficial to get experience working on a very large project that required a great deal of planning because I learned a lot about effective system design. Working in pairs and with the group as a whole was also good real-world experience." In general interns who go through this program gain the confidence they need to know that the preparation they have received in computer science at a small liberal arts college has made them competitive in this field. When approaching a new job, they will be able to learn quickly what they need to succeed.

The Fedora project was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to build an open-source digital object repository management system based on the Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture (Fedora). The new system demonstrates how distributed digital library architecture can be deployed using web-based technologies, including XML and Web services.

For more infromation, please visit the Fedora Homepage.