Hey everyone,
In order for my school to save money, they are considering moving their grading system in-house. I have been put on the committee to come up with a replacement, and after talking with the other committee members, we have decided to use Mac OS X Server 1.2 and WebObjects 4 to do this. We decided it was the most cost-effective way. Any suggestions or tips as we do this? It would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Quote from: "mrintel"Hey everyone,
In order for my school to save money, they are considering moving their grading system in-house. I have been put on the committee to come up with a replacement, and after talking with the other committee members, we have decided to use Mac OS X Server 1.2 and WebObjects 4 to do this. We decided it was the most cost-effective way. Any suggestions or tips as we do this? It would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Isn't it risky to use those old technologies for such a critical mission? The lack of support, both for the software and the hardware, could be a problem.
Nowdays, that's a bad idea. I agree with igor. I'm not a Perl evangelist or anything, but you could write the whole thing in that, and host it on any machine with any box. WebObjects 4? Was great at the time, but the net, and it's associated technologies have moved on. You can find much better frameworks to work with, and services to host it on, for free. That would be cost effective, that plus the maintenance issues with unsupported software wouldn't exist.
You're grading system will be outdated before you even finish making it. I would strongly suggest reconsidering.
Ok, thanks for your feedback. What would you suggest I use instead?
Quote from: "mrintel"Ok, thanks for your feedback. What would you suggest I use instead?
Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP = LAMP
LAMP is quite the solid performer out there! I used this set for our company's in-house requisition database system.
Who is developing the system? Engineering students? Staff? Personally I would suggest Perl over PHP as an alternative (or even Python) but each is as viable an option as the next - pick whatever one the developers have most experience with.
Actually, we comprise of 3 high school students ha. 3 juniors to be exact.
Quote from: "mrintel"Actually, we comprise of 3 high school students ha. 3 juniors to be exact.
Go the LAMP route... there are excellent books on this development set:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=linux+apache+mysql+php&x=0&y=0PHP is extremely simple to learn and to get things off the ground quickly. It was designed specifically for what you want to create. It's all about FORMS to be filled by users, SQL QUERIES to the database, and printing RESULTS for the users to see.
Obviously, you can integrate Perl scripts into it as well... if needed!
Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP are all SOLID, RELIABLE, and SUPPORTED. You can bet your job with these tools! That's what I did.
What version of Linux would you suggest I use?
Quote from: "mrintel"What version of Linux would you suggest I use?
Debian. Solid/reliable and does not contain any proprietary software or copyrighted stuff. Unlike the other flavors which includes the latest version of softwares which may not be 100% bug-free and secure. I run Debian in an enterprise environment.
I would add few things more to clarify things. WebObjects is an robust web framework built on top of Java and in the passed was built on top of webscript and objective-c. PHP is not an framework "per-se", PHP is an interpreted scripting language.
If you already mentioned the term "by today standards", and if PHP will be the choice, I would suggest to use some of the powerful frameworks built on top of PHP, eg. CakePHP.
Using something like CakePHP will save you from writing things from scratch, force you to write clean code using MVC model, and ease the development process, debugging, portability and flexibility in upgrades.
Thanks for all your input and opinions. As we get closer to finishing and if I have any major updates for you, I'll be sure to post them here as soon as I can. I do know for sure that we are using WebObjects, but we decided against Mac OS X Server. We are coming up with a Wintel machine that will run WO.
Oh, and we will be using Java as our main programming language.
If I was in this situation I would also agree with LAMP and the "P" should be Python.
Now just some bias is stated I'm perl programmer and have been since the early days of the web. If I had to do this myself I'd reach for perl and get it done. But if I was going to help some Students I would reach for Python because of the strengths it has a a "learning language", this is great project for students and should be an awesome experience. PHP is certainly a good choice for any modern project but to do it well you need to use lots of frameworks that they might not understand and could introduce security issues. So my vote would be for Python for what it is worth. [I would also probably reach for Centos 5 or 6 if you have some lead time before the start of the project but then again I have some biases in this matter also.]
-Mike
To all those who are even still curious, my computer teacher asked our school board about this project, and they said that they "would prefer if a student did not design the school's grading system," which i can understand. But basically, it's off. Thanks to all those who helped and gave your opinions, though! They were much apreciated