Studious
Overview
Studious phase 1 is a premium pilot site for publishing giant Cengage Learning that I wrote on behalf of TBA Digital Ltd. The site is an interactive study tool for the text book most widely distributed among North American universities; Stewart Calculus 6thth Edition. The site is flexible towards learning styles; after taking an initial diagnosis of their learning style, students are provided with a significant amount of interactive media such as lecture videos, solution videos, quizzes, flash cards, dynamic PDF generation for flash card printing, and glossaries. In addition further learning assistance is provided via automatic results aggregation, an online scheduling tool, and interactive play list facilities.
Technical Specifications
As with most of my sites, Studious is written to W3C XHTML 1.0 strict specification, and is also CSS 3.0 standards compliant. The site is built on a JSP back end powered by Oracle's Weblogic application server. While initially designed for Oracle database the site was adapted to the Berkeley Database Java Edition mid project due to perceived hosting constraints of the client. Due to the highly interactive nature of the site, Studious makes exhaustive use of JavaScript/Ajax functionality, which in turn is re-enforced by heavy cohesion with the Yahoo User Interface JavaScript library. The YUI framework supplements animation (accordion menu, auto scrolling), asynchronous upload, popup overlays, and browser normalized event processing. In addition, a large part of the site is also based around Action Script 3, which is used to deliver much of the site's rich media content.
My Contribution
My contribution to this project was fairly expansive ranging from the entire back end to much of the front. Firstly there was the building of the replica production environment to develop in. This involved a Solaris 10 installation with ftp server configuration and Weblogic 10g. As mentioned I adapted the Berkeley Database Java Edition to work with JSP and extended it to fit my original schema design. Basically the only areas of the site for which I can't take credit are the graphic design and the Action Script components. Moving forward, I also sliced the original designs into CSS/XHTML, and built out all of the AJAX functionality with JavaScript.
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