Issues on the design of a global university database system

The growth of the Internet is making searching tools necessary for computer users. Conventional approaches, like search engines and hierarchical indices, require considerable amount of human efforts to keep up with the Web. It's very time consuming to get facts about something specific, for example, the projects related to mobile agent in the universities in North America. In this paper, we report the Global University Database (GUD) system to alleviate this problem. The paper first introduces the GUD four-tier system architecture. It then addresses the issues on the design of the user interface of the system, in which the browser diversity and the form validation are emphasized. The paper further discusses the issues on the design of the GUD Web server extension, and Java Servlets API and CGI, as well as JDBC API, are focused. Finally, the implementation experience and future work draw the conclusion.