XML Based Learning Environment

1
XML Based Learning Environment

• Prashant Karmarkar
• Brendan Nolan
• Alexander Roda

2
Scope

• An online repository of XML Tutorials
• A secure method of access to this repository
• A functional chat module
• A functional Bulletin Board
• A pertinent call schedule or calendar
• A grading module
• An administration feature for the professor
• A cosmetic customization piece for the student
• An active contact information area for students.

3
System Design

• Our approach is to leverage an existing open
  source solution - PHPNuke
• Nuke
• Free software released under the GPL
• Written 100 in PHP

4
Nuts and Bolts.

• Linux (operating system)
• Apache (web service)
• PHP Nuke (advanced content management system)
• MySQL (backend database)
• Why use these technologies?
• Linux is free and modular, stability
• Apache is free also scalable
• PHP-Nuke is free, but also completely
  customizable, administrator has total control, no
  need to know html, configurable through a web
  browser.

5
Why Nuke?

• Managing large sites with only static HTML is too
  time consuming a CMS is more efficient
• Modular structure enables developers to easily
  extend the functionality of the site (focus on
  coding not details of integrating feature into
  site)
• Easy to use and navigate from an end user
  standpoint
• Easy to administer web forms enable
  modification of all aspects of the site
• Very granular level of security and
  administration can add multiple admins who are
  restricted to only certain features
• Its free

6
PHPNuke Architectural Overview
7
Basic Functionality?

• Authenticated Online Community
• Customized,Interactive IDE
• Tutorials
• Discussion Board
• Knowledge Base (Repository for Lecture Notes)
• Student Listings
• Open Source Solution

8
Extended Functionality?

• In addition to the base modules included with
  Nuke
• Assignments allows professor to post students
  grades
• Calendar professor and students can post events
  to calendar for class (moderated calendar)
• IRC Chat added a third party module to enable
  IRC Chatting
• XML_Validator web form to validate an xml file
  against a DTD

9
Portal Walkthrough

• Administration Panel

10
Web Services

• Self Describing
• Self-Contained
• Modular Applications
• Published
• Located
• Invoked
• Over the web

11
What are Web Services, anyway?

• TCP/IP - Universal Networking Protocol
• HTML Universal User Interface
• Java Universal Coding Language
• XML Language for Universal Data
• Open, Cross Platform Standards

12
Where is the Web heading

• More dynamic content
• Bandwidth is getting cheaper
• Storage is getting cheaper
• Pervasive Computing is becoming more important

13
Where do Web Services fit in?

• Web Services can be used to combine the content
  from various sources
• Web Service can now deliver types of content
• (streaming video or audio )
• Web Service can deal with massive amounts of data
  intelligently
• (Databases, LDAP directories, caches and load
  balancing factors)
• Users need not require to run traditional
  browsers on some version of Windows.Web Service
  can be used to serve all sorts of devices,
  platforms and browser types

14
Enabling Technologies for Web Services

• XML
• SOAP
• Binding Point Portal

15
Future Enhancements

• Schema validator
• More detailed error messages translate code to
  give more detail
• Add more flexibility to the assignments module
• Web Service - interesting to utilize Eclipse
  with XMLBuddy and access a web service to get
  information about the site (whos online,
  recently added calendar events, etc.)