Client-server architectures for distributed learning environments: a proposal

Describes work in progress at University of Salerno concerning the realization and experimentation of a distributed learning environment support tool developed by means of the Java language in an intranet environment. In particular, we focus our discussion on the definition of the existing scenario, on the requirements specification and on the description of our overall system, providing initial experimental results. We first give a general description of our system, utilizing object-oriented methodologies together with event diagrams showing interactions among the defined entities. Secondly, we describe a subset of the architecture at a more detailed level and discuss the use of Java and our experiences in interfacing Java-based software architectures with real-world objects in a learning environment. Finally, starring from an initial but reasonably wide experimentation of our system, we introduce an engineering-fashioned discussion showing the evolution from a basic and simple architecture to a more sophisticated one, which has the aim of exhibiting high flexibility, and scalability features