Re: [seul-edu] Quiet time

[Dominique Broeglin <broeglin@essi.fr>]

Doug Loss wrote:
> No deadline, really.  I'm just trolling for interesting bits to put in my
> next Linux in education report on Monday.  If that's too soon to get
> evrything written up, don't worry about it.
> 

	Hello,

	I'm following the list as a passive reader for some days but I'm not
sure this is the right place for what I have to say... All my apologizes
if I'm wrong.
	First of all, I'm preparing my PhD at the University of Nice. For some
historical reason my office is in ESSI (http://www.essi.fr) a
engineering school in Nice(France) in which I also passed my Master's
degree in informatics. That's for the context.
	At the beginning of the year some inverstigations in the way our
computer system worked has started. It developped in the replacement
(still in progress) of our main servers by Linux servers. The desktop
PC's where already on dual boot (Linux/Windows) but mainly used under
Linux for education purposes. This is changing towards linux use since
the beginning of the new term in October. Would that story (a little
enhanced, be of use for you ?)
	The investigation also highlighted the urgent need for an information
system. All administrative tasks were handled mostly by hand (with some
help from Excel and Netscape composer). About that time I undertook the
developpment of a real information system for our school. After a long
part modeling the needs and designing the application I got some help to
start the developpment. This is underway. But it's a lot of work for a
poooor PhD student like I am :-(
	The application is under GPL (it uses Debian, SapDB and JBoss : GPL,
but is written in Java). It's a web application based on J2EE technology
+ XML representation of the data
	It's main features are :
	- student/teacher listings handling
	- course (curriculum and course organisation) handling
	- planning (agenda for students/teachers/courses/rooms) [almost
finished]
	- student evaluation (grade books, etc...) [to be done]
	Once completed it should also be connected with a course (content)
publishing that is directly connected to my PhD work.
	What I'm looking for is some people that could be interested in the use
of such software (or part of it) and of course in helping a little bit
along the way. I've a lot of ideas on how to improve the application.
But the time available to me, besides my PhD work, is limited. Maybe, if
the software is of interest for enough people, a little help in starting
a community around it would be nice. I've participated periphericaly in
some OSS projects but never as a main developper and I'm not familliar
with all the implications.

	Forgive me for that long and poorly written mail, english is not quite
my best language skill ;-)

	Cheers,
	Dom
	
PS: for the brave ones that would like to take a look on the last
snapshot of the application : https://infos.essi.fr Some parts are under
password protection because the informations in the database are mostly
real.