The wind of change

Recently I have been working on a project to develop a web based question exam system. While there are few in the market at the moment, they are quite costly for institutions to implement. The system I am working on is created using PHP 5 as the base language but incorporates other languages including Javascript, HTML, CSS, XML and MYSQL.

Many commercial companies only develop for Internet explorer and use 3rd party plugins like flash/java. The goal of the project is to create a web based system which will hopefully fingers crossed be made up of pure web technologies. Many people have wondered for such a project why we are not using Ruby on Rails. At this moment in time Ruby on rails is still in development and seemingly is slower than PHP with regards to server processing. I will eventually hopefully learn how to program using MVC though that is a bit down the line.

The other plan we have in mind is using a system like PRISM for running summative web assessment which lock the user out, though more though needs to go into this.

The structure of the assessment engine will read in XML documents containing question/assessment which are located within an assessment directory. The XML is formatted in a way which is easy to ready and easily adaptable. (I am at the moment in time trying to stay away from techie lingo). Within the assessment directory will be a folder called the assessment name. Within that folder will be a configuration file containing the assessments configuration.

If anyone has any info on how they developed a system or any ideas, feel free to drop the department a line at ciad@derby.ac.uk.


Adios for now,

J