An adaptation of the web-based system architecture in the development of the online attendance system

Students' attendance records are important documents for academic institutions that reflect the students' performances and the credibility of the academic institutions. Nevertheless, the process of managing these documents had been done manually, by pen and papers thus making it less efficient. This paper discusses about the development of the new Online Attendance System as the enhancement of the previous developed system named Attendance Register System for higher academic institutions in Malaysia. The new online system is being developed by adapting the concept of the web-based system architecture. The web-based system architecture used in the development of this system involves integration of various open source web-based technologies such as MySQL, PHP and Apache Web Server hence making the Online Attendance System more efficient and cost effective. The development of the Online Attendance System involves four main phases which are the construction of the conceptual framework where the scopes and requirements as well as the target users of the system had been identified, developing the proposed system's architecture by adapting to the web-based architecture, and the construction of the logical design and the physical design. The Online Attendance System consists of automated processes such as able to generate online attendance reports, warning letters and graph charts thus making the processes of recording and reporting the students' attendances more efficient and well-organized.