Summary

To sum up, this project allowed the students to gain some practical experience with several different technologies at the same time. It is the first time that the two authors have programmatically used a web service, XML in a database, ASP.NET AJAX and the .NET-environment in general.

Additionally, this project allowed to show that the intercommunication between these different technologies in a three-tier architecture is possible without considerable difficulties once the principles are clear to the developers. However, the challenge of discovering these technologies was more demanding than expected before.

Concerning the use of different technologies some utilisations have shown to be rather artificial and exaggerated for the task to be accomplished. Concretely, the use of XML in the database does not really make sense for the present project as there is no hierarchical information to be represented. In this special case, the use of XML simply complicated the work and from a logical point of view the data now stored as XML would better be stored directly in the relational database.

As another example for a rather bad integration of available technologies the web service does not really suit a project which has a todo-list as goal. In this case the motivation for using the Amazon web service was purely academic. However, such a web service might be very useful for other projects.

The chosen architecture, namely the three-tier-architecture, has shown to be appropriate for such web applications and can be recommended for similar projects