Project Profile
Four Dutch school districts have deployed an attendance tracking system - called Carel - based on WaveMaker and built by WaveMaker partner Eljakim IT (EIT). The Carel attendance tracking system is a web-based, e-government application that manages student attendance in the Netherlands to improve the graduation rates. The Carel application consists of over 300 web pages that implement a sophisticated workflow for teachers, administrators and social workers. In the Netherlands, Carel now provides attendance tracking for over 200,000 students and is used by more than 500 social workers and school administrators.
Business Challenge
In The Netherlands, the Ministry of Education appropriates public funds to serve 3.5 million students. The top education priority for the Dutch Ministry of Education is to ensure that school children attend school from ages 5 to 18 and that all students pass a basic level of certification upon graduation. One of the Ministry's key missions is to reduce the number of drop-outs and increase the number of students with a basic level certification.
To support Ministry of Education regulations for improving high school graduation rates, each Dutch school district needs to modernize their existing attendance tracking systems. These systems are uniformly inflexible and based on old, client/server technologies. Dutch school districts are looking for a web-based attendance tracking system that can provide the following benefits:
- Modernize proprietary and inflexible client/server applications, converting them into open, web-based apps.
- Eliminate ad hoc applications that had been built as "band-aids" to address drawbacks in existing systems.
- Eliminate paper workflows that lead to errors.
- Improve security and manageability by deploying standards-based web applications that can be maintained by a centralized IT group.
Solution
Carel is an educational attendance tracking system built using WaveMaker that tracks day-to-day school attendance and helps social workers bring truant students back to school. The application uses local government records to automatically register all children aged 0 - 23 year olds. Based on this information, Carel tracks education start and end dates for each student, along with information about graduate certification levels achieved.
Besides registration and tracking of students, Carel records communications between schools and students. This is particularly important for tracking truancy and managing other discipline problems. The sensitivity of this information in Carel requires strict security controls based on user roles. For example, teachers and social workers can only see information for students assigned to them.
Key design features of Carel include:
- Web-based architecture: dramatically improves application manageability and accessibility (enabling e-government).
- Role based security: enhances security by allowing users to only see information that is directly relevant to their job.
- Integration with mainframe databases: ensures data accuracy.
- Automation of routine tasks: improves case workers productivity and eliminates human errors.
- Sophisticated web and pdf reporting: enhances analysis.
- Export data to Word and Excel: enables users to use familiar tools.
Why WaveMaker?
For the Carel application, EIT was looking for a rapid application development platform to build web-based business applications. EIT evaluated three solutions: Microsoft Access, PHP-based tools and WaveMaker. Their evaluation was:
- MS Access not web-enabled: EIT felt that deploying Carel as a fat-client application would make it inflexible and difficult to manage.
- PHP too complex: although EIT had used PHP on previous projects, they felt that it was overly complex, making it difficult to prototype applications and modify them quickly based on customer feedback.
- WaveMaker provided best web solution: the ability to build web applications quickly that could deploy on industry standard servers put WaveMaker on the top of EIT's list.
EIT also found compelling business benefits in using the WaveMaker platform to build the Carel application:
- Rapid prototyping to win business: WaveMaker's prototyping tools allowed EIT to quickly deliver working prototypes to their customer.
- Increased flexibility to increase business value: WaveMaker's flexibility allowed EIT to be responsive to user requests during the development cycle.
- Improved productivity to enhance profitability: WaveMaker's visual development tools provided a 30% productivity advantage over using PHP.
Specific technical benefits of WaveMaker for EIT included:
- Sound visual framework for web development: easy-to-use tools based on XML standards such as XForms, XPath, XSD.
- Ability to create custom layouts: enables creation of highly intuitive graphic interface.
- Strong and flexible security model: uses role-based access controls to ensure each user sees only the information they are entitled to.
- Clear separation of form design from logic: allows clear distinction between form designers and technical developers.
- Extensible platform: the flexibility of the underlying WaveMaker platform allows for easy modification and extension.
EIT Partner Profile
Eljakim IT (EIT) was founded in 1996 by Eljakim Schrijvers and has expanded rapidly over the last 10 years by focusing on building secure and reliable web applications for the government, healthcare and business sectors. For more information, see www.eljakim.com
EIT has developed custom applications for a wide range of customers, including call center, time tracking and complex reporting applications. The EIT development process consists of five distinctive steps:
- Upfront agreement on project outline
- Joint development of data model together with customer
- Iterative application development with daily feedback from customer
- Customer-driven customization
- Detailed management reporting
Development details
The Carel application consists of over 300 web pages and 112 database tables. The development process that EIT followed was:
- Prototype application using WaveMaker studio: the WaveMaker visual builder enables rapid development of screens and basic workflow.
- Customize application components and actions: WaveMaker's layouts and actions can be customized within WaveMaker studio or using standard tools like Eclipse, Photoshop and Dreamweaver.
- Deploy application using WaveMaker framework: the application can be tested within the WaveMaker studio, then deployed to run in standard J2EE or LAMP environments.
- Integrate application with back-end systems: WaveMaker supports major databases, web-services, and LDAP solutions, enabling integration with legacy mainframe databases and security systems.
Deployment status
The Carel attendance tracking application was deployed in April, 2007. The system is currently supporting over 85,000 students and more than 500 users (mostly social workers and school administrators) in the following local government districts: Kennemerland, Gooi&Vechtstreek and Zaanstad.
- Deployment software: WaveMaker 2.2, MySQL 5.0 database , Ubuntu 6.0 O/S. The database is 200MB and is expected to grow to 2GB within two years.
- Deployment hardware: Dell PowerEdge 800, 1GB RAM, 1 database server, 2 WaveMaker deployment servers configured for load balancing and failover.
