The Tennessee Technological University Education Department is migrating their existing paper portfolio system over to an electronic one. The shift represents a change in assessment style as well as a change in method. Also it is a response to increased traceability requirements of accreditors and changes in hiring practices. This presentation, given by the system architect, deals with the issues motivating the change, the audiences and challenges faced in the design and implementation, the final structure, and the lessons learned as the system has gone into production.

The presentation will give a brief introduction to the educational philosophy and assessment needs that gave rise to the system. However, the primary focus will be the architecture of the project. The main interface is via the web and is implemented using java servlets. The Turbine, Velocity and Torque tools from the Apache Jakarta project were used. Those tools and the Model/View/Controller design pattern that they support dramatically affected the structure of the design. The benefits of MVC will be discussed as well the usefulness of these particular tools.

In a system that will be tracking more than 2000 students with a storage requirement in the hundreds of gigabytes, scalability was an important concern. The division of the file storage, authentication, relational database and application components will be discussed. In particular there will be an overview of the WebDAV/DeltaV extension to HTTP for file storage and a summary of the benefits of LDAP for the authentication system.