Client-server architectures for distributed learning environments: A proposal

In this paper we describe a work in progress at University of Salerno concerning the realization and experimentation of a Distributed Learning Environment Support Tool developed by means of Java language in a Intranet environment. In particular, we focus our discussion on the definition of the Existing scenario, on the requirements specification and on the description of our overall system providing first experimental results. We firstly give a general description of our system, utilizing Object-Oriented methodologies together with Event Diagrams showing interactions among defined entities. Secondly, we describe a subset of the architecture at a more detailed level and discuss the use of Java and our experiences in interfacing Java based software architectures with real world objects in a learning environment. Finally, starting from an initial but reasonably wide experimentation of our system, we introduce an engineering-fashioned discussion showing the evolution from a basic and simple architecture to a more sophisticated one, which has the aim of exhibiting high-flexibility, and scalability features.