I [Monica Duke], attended the receent UML-WSDL training organised by JISC. Although I have previously used UML and WSDL it was still useful to get an overview. I was particularly looking forward to the practical-based sessions - it was interesting to interact and discuss design decisions with the other course participants.

The material is mostly introductory and covers notation and the use of Poseidon as a UML tool. JISC's motivation for the training is to establish common approaches across JISC elearning programmes for documenting user requirements and external specification. Thus the emphasis is on these two aspects rather than on using UML for detailed internal design. This is interesting as in Grouplog we have recently discussed and made a decision not to concentrate on detailed design diagrams which lead directly to coding - this makes sense for our development which is a small(ish) application with one main developer.

From a programmatic side, WSDL is the choice for the programmatic external specification, and this of course is the 2nd topic in the training session.

A couple of issues were raised: Firstly, since UML is a notation (rather than a methodology) and aspects of it can be mixed and matched to address different parts of the requirements and design process, organisations often develop their own standards for the degree and exact method in which UML is employed. It is not clear whether JISC will be further specifying exact subsets or embellishments for how projects are expected to apply UML.

Another issue relates to web services and security. Some applications will be dealing with sensitive student records and must take into account authentication and encryption requirements (which are not provided intrinsically with (current) Web Service standards). One suggestion is for use of encryption in transmission of sensitive data.

Chatting to other participants in the coffee breaks, it was clear that they (like GroupLog) also had questions about the re-usability of the functioanlity being developed, and on the trade-offs between presenting functionality as web services (in case they can be useful to others) or simply as internal functionality.

Monica