A distributed computing course with Java']Java based middleware projects

Java has in-built support for distributed computing. As die first language designed from the bottom up with networking and distributed computing in mind, Java makes it easy for computers to cooperate. Students of distributed computing need adequate exposure to this technology and in order to meet this need the author has put together a course on distributed computing which uses Java's support for object-oriented programming, client-server applications, multithreaded servers, security, and distributed objects. This paper describes this course and the programming projects developed and used in the course. Students developed programming projects using open source, Java based middleware technologies that built on the lectures. The focus of the course and projects was providing students with a clear understanding of the trade-offs involved with the different Java based middleware technologies as they design and implement distributed applications.