Information on individual educational components (ECTS-Course descriptions) per semester

• Knowledge of network protocols up to the transport layer
• Experiences in Object-oriented programming
• Good Java programming skills
• Basic knowledge of databases
• Experience in developing web applications
• Knowledge of XML & JSON

This course deals with the concepts and technologies of heterogeneous applications that are also distributed across company boundaries:

• Microservice design and architectures
• Building microservices with Spring Boot and Cloud
• Developing RESTful Web services with Spring Boot and Database access
• Cloud concepts Health Check Monitoring, Service Discovery, Resiliency
• Implementing additional security with Spring Security
• Event driven architecture
• DevOps and deployment concepts

As part of the project, students work in teams to develop a complex distributed system with diverse interfaces using a combination of the technologies they have learned.

Technical and Methodological Competence (T/M)

• Students understand the characteristics of distributed systems, various paradigms of distributed information processing and efficient communication protocols.
• Students have an overview of the relevant architectures of distributed systems.
• Students have experience with distributed objects in Java and understand the specifics of asynchronous communication technologies.
• Students have insight into the functionality and programming of directory services, e.g., LDAP.
• Students can implement enterprise-wide applications in practice using Spring Boot and can complement the implemented back-end systems with suitable clients, e.g., web front-ends in React.
• Students have basic knowledge regarding scalability, reliability, fault tolerance, and security in distributed systems.

Through the “Project” learning format, this course also contributes to the development of the following interdisciplinary competencies:

Social and Communication Competence (S/C)

• Leadership competence: Ability to lead teams
• Empathy: Willingness and ability to understand people and their concerns
• Motivation skills: Ability to inspire others for a cause
• Intercultural competence: Knowing and appreciating prevailing differences in various cultures
• Conflict management: Constructively dealing with different viewpoints and interests, recognizing causes in conflict situations and developing solutions
• Teamwork, willingness to cooperate, ability to handle criticism: Defining goals together in a team and committing to them, contributing constructively, and dealing with criticism constructively
• Negotiation skills and conversation management: Confident and sovereign appearance in negotiations, representing one’s own or the team’s interests well
• Reliability: Adhering to rules and agreements and completing one’s tasks with the promised quality

English is the technical language of computer science. Students are familiar with technical literature in both German and English. They can describe technical matters and processes in both languages.

Self-Competence (S)

• Self-reflection ability: Knowing one’s own abilities and limits and reflecting on one’s actions
• Learning competence and motivation: Ability and willingness to acquire new knowledge independently and learn from successes and failures
• Adaptability: Being able to adapt to changing conditions and handle varying situations
• Decision-making ability: Knowing one’s decision-making scope and the associated responsibility, gathering necessary information, developing alternatives, setting priorities and finding a solution in a reasonable time
• Willingness to take responsibility: Ability and willingness to assess the consequences of one’s decisions and actions for oneself and others and to form an independent judgment
• Ethical competence: Ability to perceive a situation as ethically significant, formulate normative behavioral rules and justify them
• Initiative: Willingness to commit and engage
• Entrepreneurial competence: Ability to understand entrepreneurial decisions and think and act entrepreneurially
• Perseverance: Ability to deal constructively with difficult conditions, such as high pressure, resistance, disruptions and to perform well over long, challenging phases
• Expressiveness: Ability to express oneself clearly and understandably in both spoken and written language, with appropriate word choice for the situation
• Appearance: Ability to appear confident, trustworthy and convincing according to the situation

Transfer Competence (T)

• Analytical and presentation/communication skills: Ability to grasp and organize extensive and complex relationships quickly, filter out the essential, and present it in an understandable manner
• Judgment and problem-solving ability: Assessing situations and deriving consequences and solutions
• Customer orientation: Recognizing and appropriately addressing the needs of customers, partners, etc., in terms of service and quality
• Organizational skills: Being able to translate goals into work tasks and use available resources optimally
• Project management: Ability to carry out projects in a timely and needs-based manner

Lecture, seminar, project in a team with requirements workshops and customer presentations, project work with technical coaching and coaching on project management; feedback on the implementations in the project.

exercise (30%)
exercise (30%)
project work developed within a team (40%)

For a positive grade, a minimum of 50% of the possible points must be achieved in each part of the examination.

Not applicable

Weblinks for Spring Boot:

• Documentation Overview: https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/documentation.html
• Spring Boot Reference Documentation: https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/htmlsingle/
• Spring Guides: https://spring.io/guides
• Fundamentals of Software Architecture,Mark Richards & Neal Ford: https://fundamentalsofsoftwarearchitecture.com/
• Martin Fowler: https://martinfowler.com

Suggested reading material for frontend part:

1. MDN (reference for HTML, CSS & JavaScript)
2. web.dev (learning material from Google)
3. TypeScript
4. react.dev
5. nextjs.org

On-site course, mandatory attendance for the kick-off meeting, coaching sessions, seminar exercise sessions, final project presentation, possible repetition of the final project presentation and exam.