ne of your assignments in this course is to complete a research paper. This assignment is designed to help you further your knowledge in a subject of interest to you, while being exposed to other students' research. In the information systems field, the technology changes rapidly, and people working in this field must develop their ability to get up to speed quickly. This assignment will help you practice that skill, while allowing you to learn more about a topic of interest. This assignment involves researching a topic, creating a brief written presentation, and leading a discussion for the rest of the class.

The following topics are recommended. If you are interested in doing a topic not listed here, please message or email me before the deadline for selecting topics. Remember, the material must be your original work done specifically for this course.

• Compare Procedural and Object Oriented Programming

"There is a certain amount of ranting on both sides of the issue, and slogans such as "Objects are bad!" or "Objects are good!" are sometimes heard?do(es) not attempt to decide between the two approaches and come up with a single "best practice", but? explore the advantages and disadvantages of each." Robert Peake, ZEND software.

• Compare the Java and .NET programming languages

"The future of software development is now expected to be a near 50-50 split between Java and .Net. When making a decision on which technology to bank on, you should really research what types of companies use which technology, and which fits into your career aspirations. Java and .Net overlap in a lot of markets and inevitably each will form definitive niches that will be hard to break until newer model-based programming technologies take over." Payton Byrd, Java vs .Net – The Professional Software Developer's Survival Guide

• Describe and Discuss Service Oriented Architectures

"Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a hot topic in enterprise computing because many IT professionals see the potential of an SOA — especially a web services-based SOA — in dramatically speeding up the application development process. They also see it as a way to build applications and systems that are more adaptable, and in doing so, they see IT becoming more agile in responding to changing business needs." Ed Ort, Sun Developer Network

• Describe and Discuss Software Design Patterns

"A software design pattern describes a family of solutions to a software design problem?

The purpose of design patterns is to capture software design know-how and make it reusable. Design patterns can improve the structure of software, simplify maintenance, and help avoid architectural drift. Design patterns also improve communication among software developers and empower less experienced personnel to produce high-quality designs." Walter F. Tichy, Essential Software Design Patterns

• Describe and Discuss Extreme Programming (XP)

"Extreme Programming is a discipline of software development based on values of simplicity, communication, feedback, and courage. It works by bringing the whole team together in the presence of simple practices, with enough feedback to enable the team to see where they are and to tune the practices to their unique situation." Ron Jeffries, XP Magazine

• Describe and Discuss Integrated Development Environments

"An integrated development environment (IDE) (also known as an integrated design environment and integrated debugging environment) is computer software to help computer programmers develop software.

They normally consist of a source code editor, a compiler and/or interpreter, build-automation tools, and (usually) a debugger. Sometimes a version control system and various tools to simplify the construction of a GUI are integrated as well. Many modern IDEs also integrate a class browser, an object inspector and a class hierarchy diagram, for use with object oriented software development. Although some multiple-language IDEs are in use, such as the Eclipse IDE or Microsoft Visual Studio, typically an IDE is devoted to a specific programming language, as in the Visual Basic IDE." Wikipedia