Introduction

Hi, my name is Paul Rickert and I am studying an MBA (Info Tech) at Charles Sturt University under sponsorship of the Royal Australian Air Force. This is my tenth masters subject (two more to go...wooohooo!) and my first IT subject. My full-time job is a Logistics Officer within the Royal Australian Air Force, and I have served for ten years, which has taken me all over Australia and the world including the Middle East, India, Canada, USA and Japan. I also have a multitude of hobbies and interests including playing the guitar, building guitars and other musical instruments as a hobby Luther, mountain biking, kayaking, jogging and generally staying fit. I have to admit, I’m not much of an IT guru, and actually try to spend as little time as possible staring at a computer outside of work as I prefer outdoor pursuits. As part of my study I have enrolled in this subject (ICT594 E-systems Infrastructure Development) one of four IT subjects required to complete the “Info Tech” part of my MBA. Part of the assessment for this subject requires the development of an “e-portfolio” through blogging about my study experiences. The development of this blog is to be conducted through role play, and I have chosen to role play the part of ICT Manager as this is most closely aligned to the work I perform in my day job as a manager. In terms of background, I have no real prior experience with E-systems infrastructure development, other than being a customer buying stuff from e-retailers, however I look forward to learning far more than I ever cared to know about this particular topic. The purpose of this e-portfolio is to capture learning experiences as I progress through the course, which is broken down into 12 separate subtopics, with a topic being covered each week. These topics are as follows:

1. E-commerce, distributed applications and the Internet
2. Clients, servers and distributed paradigms
3. Database servers: open source and Microsoft platforms
4. Programming web servers: Languages for the web
5. Web technologies & frameworks (XML, Ruby on Rails)
6. Distributed objects – RMI and CORBA
7. Internet security
8. Concurrency and transactions
9. Designing distributed systems: business process modelling & MVC
10. Bots, agents, spiders and mobile computing
11. Case study topics: cloud, grid & service oriented computing
12. Systems integration: open source and Microsoft platforms

The course is structured such that one topic is covered per week, and as such, blogs entries will be made at least on a weekly basis (where practical) as I work through the activities and workshops for this subject. The structure of the blog is relatively straightforward and is divided into the following sections:

Introduction – the bit you are reading now!

Exercises – Details of learning outcomes for, and responses to the study guide led exercises.

Workshops – Details of learning outcomes for, and Responses to “Ruby on Rails” workshops.

Resources – References used in the blogs, useful website, software etc…

Commentary – My own thoughts and ideas which don’t neatly fit under the Exercises and Workshops.

Conclusion – Findings and Evaluation of the Whole Learning Journey.

So without any further ado, onto the onwards……