CourseWork Pilot at Denison: the technical details
Charles Reitsma, Systems Engineer
Every project begins with someone saying “Could you do this?” and making it sound so easy that you say “yes.” I was given 5 months warning. The project seemed simple enough: set up an open source courseware project from Stanford. So I accepted. I immediately recruited the assistance of our Oracle DBA, Doug Davenport. Then I promptly forgot about it.
In October I was again warned the project was coming up. This time I was given the choice of going to Stanford for training on the project before installing it. I accepted. At Stanford, the project was laid out in detail in two tracks: a technical track and a user/administrator track. I sat in on the technical track. Later I would feel that it would have been good to get both tracks. What I did see was perfectly clear. The developers took us through the installation steps and did not appear to be glossing over anything. The developers did not actually have the code ready for us to take yet but I felt ready to run with it. A week later I had the tarball.
I quickly realized as I worked through the steps alone that I did not know all I needed to install and run a Tomcat/Apache instance. The Tomcat web site is full of information but very little clear instruction. The product is distributed in binary code form and source code form. I settled for the binary code as I wanted to get the project running quickly. In my search for clear instructions I found More Servlets and Java Server Pages by Marty Hall. It contains step-by-step guides for getting Tomcat installed and running. It had good explanations of what the common errors are. Within three weeks of leaving Stanford I had Stanford’s CourseWork project running. The Oracle database was built and connecting properly thanks to the efforts of the DBA. Scott was already asking if a single site could host more than one school’s courses on it. Stanford had set up a mailing list for the project so this and any other question that came up went there.
Scott indicated that he thought three weeks was excessive for getting the project running. Considering that I had no hands on experience with Tomcat prior and no Java programming I felt that we had gotten through it rather easily. During the time I had gotten the project running, John Norman in the U.K. had modified it to work with Java 1.4, Tomcat version 4, using Postgres as its database and provided the developers with a patch for their code. Clearly the people with additional experience and skills were further ahead.
So, Denison now had Stanford’s CourseWork product running on our campus. We needed to make it Denison’s CourseWork product. Changes had to be made to the Oracle tables to populate them with the name of departments at Denison. Stanford uses quarters and Denison uses semesters so more changes were required. These changes were done by editing the original scripts that built the Oracle tables and rebuilding. Scott had me give the Stanford graphics to his staff to change them into Denison graphics. I then needed to go through all the template files and make the links to documentation and email addresses point to Denison University sites. About this time Stanford provided us with a new tarball with the latest code changes.
With vacations and holidays the Denison version of CourseWork was not online until January 22. Scott created the first course and thought it was slick. A week later when he started creating user accounts we realized something was wrong. Users were supposed to get an email message indicating their new account and password. Users were not getting these emails. Daisy Flemming, CourseWork developer at Stanford, realized they had used Stanford’s email server in the code. She told us what to change. We did this, removed all the accounts and recreated them. The users received their emails with their passwords.
Two weeks later and we started seeing error messages when assignment were created. This was tracked down to expectations of being able to write into certain directories that did not yet exist. March 9th, 2003 I am still being told about pages which need to have their headers and footers corrected to eliminate Stanford links in favor of Denison ones. A few weeks later the first of three students forgets his CourseWork password. I found the passwords in cleartext in one of the Oracle tables and was able to tell the student.
So, we were successful in getting CourseWork fixed and running. Questions were answered by the developers and changes provided via their mailing list. It is wonderful to be able to discuss and make changes as needed. Getting some training in Java or having someone else with Java training available would be helpful. If we choose to continue using CourseWork we will need to consider multiple front-end systems to provide adequate performance. Stanford uses 4 Sun Netra T1 systems. Denison would likely find three Sun LX50’s sufficient for the whole campus. The pilot was carried out on a Sun Netra X1 for the frontend and a Sun E450 for the Oracle database.