Building a Large-Scale Information System for the Education Sector: A Project Experience

Implementing a large-scale information system for the education sector involves a number of engineering challenges, such as high security and correctness standards imposed by the law, a large and varied group of end users, or fault-tolerance and a distributed character of processing. In this paper we report on our experiences with building and deploying a senior high school recruitment system for five major cities in Poland. We discuss system architecture and design decisions, such as thin vs. rich client, on-line vs. off-line processing, dedicated network vs. Internet environment. We also analyse potential problems our present approach may cause in the future.