Developing Server-Side Infrastructure for Large-Scale E-Learning of Web Technology

Abstract

The growth of E-business has made experience in server-side technology an increasingly important area for educators. Server-side skills are in increasing demand and recognised to be of relatively greater value than comparable client-side aspects (Ehie, 2002). In response to this, many educational organisations have developed E-business courses, but their approaches cannot generally be applied in the distance learning context. Providing server-side infrastructure is important to allow students to gain an appreciation of concepts as well as experiencing aspects like network operation, time delays and failure and ‘just-in-time’ collaboration, which are basic characteristics of distributed applications. Here, the development of a scalable architecture and successful provision of access to a set of server applications for a very large number of students is described. A key objective is to establish a framework that can be applied in education and commerce to support very large-scale deployment of web applications and services for applications with varying properties.