This CPD course is meant for staff in the software industry; primarily those who are taking part in some continuous professional development programme. In order to take full advantage of this course you will need:

• To be able to program in Java or have a reading knowledge of this language, we would suggest that you should have been working with Java in an industrial context for about a year.
  
• To be familiar with object-oriented concepts such as class, inheritance and method.

The course consists of a number of components:

• A core which describes the processes involved in system integration. Studying this core should take you between 25 to 30 hours. It is this core that you will be examined on in order to gain a certificate of course completion.
  
• A series of optional pieces of reading which looks in detail at many of the technologies described in the core. You do not have to read these parts of the course to gain a certificate of course completion. These pieces of reading are preliminary drafts of material which can be found in The OU course Tools for Systems Integration which will be available in 2007. It forms part of the OU computing taught masters programme which leads to an award of an M.Sc. The optional reading consists of material on: web services, Entity Java Beans, Java Server Pages, XML, design patterns, the programming language Python and the programming language PERL.

The course is split into a number of chunks of work which should take you between 30 minutes to an hour to complete. During this hour you will

• Read some text.
  
• Answer some self assessment questions which check that you have understood the material in the chunk.
  
• Carry out some activity such as looking at some web pages. An activity will normally take much longer than a self-assessment question.
  
• Carry out some thinking and reflection.