i-Questionnaire - a software service tool for data analysis in e-Business

Customization and flexibility of generating managed source codes for questionnaire in data analysis with the approach of Software as a Service (SaaS) becomes an essential and critical mission in e-Business. Today, building a on-demand software service for web-based questionnaire generation system is new in cloud computing environment. This paper describes a SaaS approach to dynamically generate a full set of ASP.net source codes and database schema for web-based questionnaire systems for data analysis in e-Business. The tool we proposed, i-Questionnaire, adopts SaaS for the software delivery model in which software and its associated data are hosted centrally and accessed by users using a thin client. The tool i-Questionnaire provides the template selections for designers to choose and construct the questionnaires they prefer. The generated ASP.net source codes can be presented in the form of the questionnaires shown on the mobile or web-based platforms via internet. The results of the answers are stored in repository for data analysis and data mining. It also provides the table schema definition for any relational database server in a cloud computing environment. In addition, the generated source codes present the result data on-line in graphical presentation in a technical and professional way. In this paper, four major components are identified in the SaaS framework, which have been fully implemented with the C++ language in our prototyping. The outcomes of i-Questionnaire, source codes of ASP.net and SQL table schema, can be simply placed in IIS Server under cloud computing environment to perform business analysis.