Computer Science Capstone Design
Capstone Project Description

SOAized Tools - SHIELD

Sponsor Information:

Michael I. Inman
Lockheed Martin IS&GS
Software Engineering Associate Manager

Phone # (623)925-7538
Email: michael.i.inman@lmco.com

Project Overview:

Problem:
The end product of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) processing is a byte-stream formatted image. Due to the resolution of SAR imagery, these products tend to be quite large, sometimes on the order of several gigabytes. This byte-stream imagery is not supported by commercial software tools for display. Our current technology is to use home grown tools to display and manipulate the byte-stream imagery. Generally these tools are installed on the end user or clients machine, which requires the client to ftp/rcp/or download the data to their local workstation. In addition these tools usually have some form of background processing that is available to be performed upon the byte-stream imagery. Due to the large amount of data inherent in a SAR imagery file, this download and processing of the data can be expensive in both time and hardware resources. We have seen several cases where it has taken longer to download the imagery than to produce it in the first place.


Solution:
A viable solution to the imagery transfer and processing problem would be to implement the home grown tool in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). In this architecture, the tool would be broken into two pieces. The first piece would be the Graphical Users Interface (GUI), which would still reside on the clientÕs machine. The second piece would be the services that would reside where the byte-stream imagery resides. In this architecture the intensive background processing would stay with the actual data. Additionally only the end data needed would be transferred to the client. The home grown tool would be broken up, such that what makes sense to "SOAize" is exposed in services that the GUI can then use. The GUI can exist on almost any piece of hardware, while keeping the back end work on higher dollar hardware.

Implementation:
Quoting directly from Designing Web Services with the J2EE 1.4 Platform by Singh, Brydon, Murray, Ramachandran, Violleua, & Strems : "A Service Oriented Architecture is an architecture style that promotes software reusability by creating reusable services. Traditional object-oriented architectures promote reusability by reusing classes or objects. However, objects are often too fined grained for effective reuse. Hence, component-oriented architectures emerged that use software components as reusable entities. The service-oriented architectures use a service as a reusable entity. The services are typically coarser grained than components, and the focus on the functionality provided by their interfaces. These services communicate with each other and with end-user clients through well-defined and well-known interfaces."

Using the concept of a SOA and developing a suite of web services, we propose to solve the imagery transfer and processing problem of the home grown tool.

 

Knowledge, skills, and expertise that will be required for this project:

Java programming language V1.5, V1.6
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
Web Services, Java Web Services Pack V1.6 or higher
Apache V2.2.3 or greater
Apache Tomcat/Jakarta V5.5.17 or greater
Image file formats (TIF, JPEG, GIF)

Equipment Requirements:

The software will ultimately be deployed on a Sun T2000 Unix box. However, for development purposes, two PC's or a PC and Unix box, one as the client and one as the server, should be used to demonstrate the SOA. We recommend the use of Wintel platforms for development of the actual code.

Software is available free of charge from Sun Microsystems and the Apache Org. Java 1.5, 1.6 and the Java Web Services Pack are all available for download from the Sun website. Apache and Apache Tomcat/Jakarta are all available for download from the Apache Org website. Lockheed Martin will provide a home grown tool, source code included and imagery sample files.

Additionaly Lockheed Martin will provide an example Web Service, along with documentation on how to setup and use the service.

 

Deliverables:

  1. Design and implement a SOAized solution using Web Services and a home grown tool provided by Lockheed Martin.
  2. Demonstrate the viability of breaking a home grown tool out, using SOA and Web Services.
  3. Provide Lessons Learned about how to break a home grown tool out, to support being SOAized.
  4. Perform timing tests and analysis to demonstrate improved performance over downloading and performing the actions locally.