[Seaside] Databases for the Testmaker website

[Tim Rowledge]

(Colin, I added you explicitly since I don't know if you're on the
seaside mailing list; if you are then let me know and I can save you
getting two copies of everything)

So, I've asked some neophyte questions about using a database for my
testmaker website project. Now it's time to try to explain what I need
so I can help you knowledgable ones give your best advice. I suspect my
needs are so trivial you'll probably fall off your perches laughing, but
the only database usage I've done is making a trivial FileMaker system
for my local library to keep track of volunteer helpers' times. I can
_spell_ sybase, but that's about it. Oh, and I consulted a little on
Smalltalk issues for Gemstone about three hundred years ago. When
dinosaurs roamed the desktop.

What I need is a database that can keep track of the following:-

a) a number (hopefully large, but perhaps in the 5-100 range) of
customers - mostly colleges of various sorts, but let's not limit
ourselves. Maybe IBM will want to use it to teach salesdroids how to
smile on the phone?

b) the staff in each customer (ie teachers in each college), perhaps as
many as a dozen?, using the system.

c) the enrolled students in each customer (enrolled on the course(s)
using the system, not all of them) maybe as many as a hundred per
customer.

d) the courses in each customer using the system. I'm assuming each
college will likely have several courses, with one or more staff
attached to each course, with each staff working on one or more courses.
It's likely each student might be attending more than one course.

e) pools of question-generators (which are the magic trick that can
produce many variations on a theme), some private, some public

f) tests, each a collection of generate questions.

g) student records, the list of which tests each student has taken,
when, the score, etc.

h) errrrrrrr. I think that's it.

Although one could make a fine assemblage of classes for all this and
keep them all in a terribly cool Object Database Of Immense Coolness, I
suspect that since everything is merely strings and a few numbers (and
of course saving& parsing numbers as strings is trivial) we have a
rather simple problems here. For somebody with a booking on the DataBase
Clue Train, at least.

I have a feeling that it would be smart to use a very boring, standard
system for all those reasons I outlined in a message to the squeak list.
It's hard enough getting dunderheads to accept the idea of a webserver
written in anything other than jarlthon without tryingto explain that
the data is being kept in a wierdo format understood only by criminal
minds involved with open source ruby-ridge activist terrorrists
dedicated to the overthrow of civilisation.

Help me obi-wan-Seaside, you're my only rope!

tim

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim@sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
To succeed in politics, it is often necessary to rise above your principles.