Now You Know!

Now You Know was the code name for a project at PRI to create an on-line training site. This site would allow teachers to create courses and deploy them on the site. Students could search the site for courses of interest and navigate them with a series of Web pages.

Although never made public, the NYK project was completed for a beta trial. Course developers were able to write courses using a custom Java application or a Java Server Pages based Web site. Course information was stored in a database and in XML format. Students could take and review courses, as well as search the site.

Some of the techniques and technologies I used in developing the initial version of the NYK project are:

  • A custom JHTML engine for driving the JSP pages, before a commercial version was available
  • An extensible, template-based Web page authoring system
  • A customized search engine that supported regular expression searches, using indexing and servlet technology
  • An XML format for storing information about a course and the author
  • An on-line testing engine
  • An object framework for representing on-line courses
  • An extensible architecture for supporting multiple media types including Video, Audio, and interactive tests
  • An extensible framework for generating HTML from XML based on loadable media handlers
  • An automated glossary builder that took words and definitions and generated links on HTML pages appropriately
  • Spell checking across multiple UI elements, and even across multiple tabs in a TabPane
  • A servlet-based tracking database to keep track of where student were in a course and which courses they had completed
  • A customized login database
pri java ux design javascript jsp xml html servlet