Learning Management System
 

Hello all,

My cousin is the head of I.T something-or-other for Boots (a very large retail company here in the UK) and has been gived the task of finding a company to produce a Learning Management System for their internal training. It has to be accesible through the net.

If you don't know what an LMS is then get your ass over here.

Just wondering how everyone would go about tackling it if they were producing the system for the company. What language would you use? What database? What other resources would be required?

Don't worry, I'm not about to attempt this project (too much uni work anyway ;) ) I'm just curious.

I would use PHP with a MySQL database, but that's all I know and therefor is my answer to everything! Honestly though don't know if PHP could handle something so complex?



Ta Ade

You pretty much hit the nail on the head with your PHP/MySQL idea. I can not see that combination being insufficient. There may be some lessons where Java/Javascript helps a lot. Java plugins and clientside Javascript activities are usually neat things to have included on VLEs. Other then that, there isn't really much else to it. PHP is powerful enough to handle any server-side tasks within your apparent requirements.

Can you work Java with PHP? another general question of mine!

It depends what you mean by "work it with PHP".

Java, I don't know Java. I assume there is support for reading websites. In which case you could contact any PHP page and parse the results. I don't see why you would ever need Java to interact with a PHP script, unless doing some sort of "high scores" idea.

Javascript, you can make it interact with a PHP script in certain ways. But probably not how you had in mind.

What did you have in mind exactly?

Nothing in particular, just general wonderings.

I mean after leaning c++ PHP seems kinda weak to me but I guess that's because of all the librarys you can access with C++.

When I say work with I mean like could you use java to fill in the gaps for things PHP can't handle.

Nope. I'm not sure how strong you are on your terminology, but Java is a client-side programming language when used on the internet. You won't be using it for direct access of databases, forget anything to do with server related things. It's generally for interactive activities, where everything is calculated on the client's computer. Hope you get what I mean. :p

So it's like Javascript in that way like? Whereas PHP code is executed before the client 'sees' the page Java is done while the page is being viewed?

As far as I know. :)

However, a lot of people won't like seeing Java where it doesn't need to be used. Anyone who wants to see a Java plugin on a web page, will need to install the Java Runtime Environment. And now that I think of it, Java most definitely can interact with your server. I have seen online chat programs written in Java that do just that. Yet, it is not nearly as direct as PHP is.

Fair one, is there anything that PHP cannot do in the realm of the net (I understand that it cannot do what was just mention, where Javascript can run while the page is being viewed). What kind of thing would you use it with another language for? I apologise if I'm being too vague.

Nah, I get what you're saying, and I've actually been wondering the exact same thing myself. I'm not sure if PHP has access to actual computer functions, like running an executable binary on the server itself. That would just be a question of whether it has control over the os's system calls or not. I assume it quite possibly does have this kind of control. However, there are most likely things it can not do. Yet, in the realm of the net, I don't see why you would need to do anything in those regards.

I'll think of my server for example... It is coded in Python (so it has complete control over my computer in the same respect as C++ could). I do certain things like creating images dynamically and serving them. I'm pretty sure PHP has access to image manipulation libraries. I also have some places where I retrieve the contents of a folder using os's "dir" command... PHP probably can do this. Then there are some other things like getting the sizes of files, loading font objects, copying/moving/deleting files, sha/base64 encryption. And I'm actually quite certain that PHP can do all of this.

So, sorry if it seems like I'm rambling. I'm trying to figure this out for myself too. Haha. After all, PHP may have power over everything that you would ever need to execute server-side. Especially for a VLE, I can't see anything being out of PHP's reach.