Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
DIPLEK PLATFORM
Net framework (Richter, 2002) to be installed for
the platform to run smoothly. To support central-
ized access to Diplek's repository, a database
server is needed to host the MySQL database.
The hardware requirements needed to run the
platform are set to a minimum. A recommended
configuration for the database server would be an
Intel Xeon processor with 2 GB RAM, at least 1
GB of free disk space and a network adapter that
supports the TCP/IP protocol. For the worksta-
tions, the minimum requirements are: a Pentium
III processor with 512 MB of RAM, a VGA
compatible Graphics card, at least 100 MB of
free disk space and a network adapter.
Before setting up the database server it is cru-
cial to point out how many concurrent users will
be connected to the platform and the amount of
LOs the platform will hold. In order to maximize
the number of concurrent connected users on the
platform, more processing power is required for
the database server. The amount of LOs stored in
Diplek's database is only limited by the free disk
space on the database server. All LOs are stored
in database tables in binary form. Diplek is tested
to work under Microsoft Windows 2000, XP and
Vista. A new version will be soon available to
support Microsoft Windows 7.
Diplek is an open educational LMS that allows
learners and instructors to easily manage learning
resources in an integrated system. The platform
design follows all modern educational software
design guidelines and learning standards. Diplek is
distributed under a creative commons Attribution-
Share Alike Unported 3.0 license, where users can
copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the platform
as long as they distribute the resulting work only
under the same, similar or a compatible license.
Both the installation and the source code files are
freely available to users.
The Diplek platform adopts a 3-tier archi-
tecture. The platform operation is composed of
group of services offered by several autonomous
components that cooperate with each other and
give the user the look and feel of a modern class-
room. Users type their credentials and authentica-
tion service processes them. Each user role has
a different access level; users are classified into
learners, instructors and administrators.
Technical Overview
The development of Diplek was based on Mi-
crosoft Visual Studio platform and Microsoft
Visual Basic 2005 programming language (Balena,
2006). On the backend a MySQL Relational Da-
tabase Management System (RDBMS) (DuBois,
2008) is responsible for holding all the platform
data. The connection between the application
and the backend is possible by using the ADO.
NET MySQL connector (McClure, 2006) and
the TCP/IP protocol. Some of Diplek's services
where developed by reusing and adapting code
that came from the Moodle project but due to the
different programming languages used (Moodle is
developed with the PHP programming language)
some refactoring of classes and functions were
required.
As with any other platform based on Microsoft.
Net technologies, Diplek requires the Microsoft.
Platform Initialization
The platform initialization and loading phase
consists of three stages. The first stage concerns
user entrance. When a learner user enters the
system, the course selection service is activated
and the learner has to select a course to attend to.
Afterwards, the user has the option to retrieve the
last saved state of the system or to start a new ses-
sion. Either way, the virtual assistant and session
recorder services are loaded. The session recorder
service is responsible for monitoring the user's
learning path in the platform. The virtual assis-
tant service pops up a kind of “Microsoft agent”
component that is programmed to assist the user
in his very early steps with the platform, so that
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