Design and development of Melbourne IT Creator/sup TM/-a system for authoring and management of online education

This paper presents a case study in the symbiotic use of new Internet based technologies and an SQL server to develop a software tool in a new category of generic software: a system for authoring and delivery of Web-centric learning. In the design and implementation of the system, the developers drew upon the latest available languages and platforms, aiming for a high benchmark in this new software genre: Java for cross platform authoring tools; JavaScript and HTML V4 for scripting and markup; applets, video and other media types as object components; IIS (Microsoft's Internet Information Server technology) to deliver dynamically constricted HTML markup. Behind the interfaces and business rules is robust SQL server technology, which is taking on an expanded role in proliferating Web based information systems. In the latter half of the paper problems and solutions are discussed, including the use of metadata and XML (the eXtensible Markup Language) as part of the solutions.