This was a big project during the summer of 2008. I can’t say who the work was for, but I can post about what the system does.

The requirements:

• An online system that can be used by students to take tests
• Tests had to be open for an extended period of time
• Tests (in version 1) had to consist of multiple choice, and numeric input
• Students had be able to login and out and answer questions when and where they wanted during the test period
• Once the test period was over students had to be able to login and get their marks and feedback
• Copies of the test had to be downloadable for emailing to students
• Marks had to be available for input into another system
• All student/system interactions had to be logged and tracked.
• System had to be ‘extensible’, i.e. version 2 can be developed later.

So, the system was written using php for the front end and MySQL for the database. The web interface uses AJAX.

It was decided to use AJAX so that once a student answered a question the result was immediately sent to the database, so if there was a power outage, or the student forgot to save their text results, the answers were still captured. On the whole this has worked well, but some students using ‘older’ browsers from home (you know the sort of browser I mean!) had problems with the use of AJAX. However, as the system as built in error checking (i.e. nightly cross check between the server log for the day and the database state) these problems were dealt with.

There was no easy solution for ‘emailing’ out a copy (a pdf was required) of the results. In the end a compromise was reached when an html ‘dump’ from a test session was generated and this was converted to a pdf file using AppleScript and then the system mailed the results to the students.

The final product worked very well,and the clients were pleased. And this summer I am back to write version 2….

This post doesn’t really have anything to do with MMISoftware, but tripping over this web page, got me thinking…

The web page mentioned above is supposedly one of the first webpages on the web, dating from, I guess, 1992. So I was trying to think when I saw my first webpage, and what browser was I using….

My guess would be possibly the summer of 1993, or the early spring of 1994 at the latest. Up until that point I had been using GopherSpace (see wikipedia quite a bit and ftp, but getting around the internet was difficult. I remember the first browser I used on a Mac couldn’t even load images, I think is was produced by the NCSA and later became Mosaic (wikipedia).

I do know that I wrote my first webpage, and put together my first website, in the summer of 1994. The site, believe it or not, is still going strong and has ‘morphed’ in to the ‘Henley Pages‘, my then home town…

How time flies? Which reminds me of a great old joke ‘Time flies like an arrow; Fruit Flies like a banana’.

Update: Just found a photo online of the ‘first web server’ – the picture