Technology Used

What technologies and/or e-tools were available to you or did you seek to develop?

The following key tools, frameworks and components were used in the development process:

• AndroMDA - an MDA tool that can generate code from UML models
• Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2005 - AndroMDA was used to generate code in the C# language. The service implementations and user interface were then written using the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET development environment
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000 - AndroMDA is also capable of generating data definition statements in SQL for any database. The Topcat project used the SQL Server 2000 database to persist the data
• Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) - Microsoft IIS was used to host the live application with the university's central server infrastructure
• The assessment demonstrator used a similar MDA tool named Sculptor which, in turn, was based on openArchitectureWare framework
• Topcat was developed from the start as an enterprise system, being sited in the University's server farm from early in the project, thus benefitting from enterprise sizing of networked resources and server management. Topcat was integrated with enterprise systems. The URL https://topcat.manchester.ac.uk and the support email address topcat@manchester.ac.uk were allocated early on