Portfolio
Appsolo’s approach to software development means that we can target desktop applications and web applications with a single development platform.
WebFolio
DotNetNuke
DotNetNuke is a content management system tailored by Appsolo to the hosting of educational resources. It manages class notes, past exam papers, assignments and result – acting as a hub for all class related material.
DotNetNuke is a content management system deployed to manage educational resources for class groups at IT Sligo. It competes in a similar space to Drupal and Joomla.
The specification here called for a one-stop shop for students – class notes, assignments, past exams, results, commentary, feedback etc. Though a standard Learning Management System (LMS) is already in use at IT Sligo (Moodle) – it presents a restrictive structure for learning and customising it presents challenges for service providers. DotNetNuke (unlike many alternatives) is delivered using ASP.NET which is a compiled language and therefore enjoys significant performance benefits over interpreted solutions such as PHP.
This particular install of DotNetNuke is heavily customised to deliver a cohesive set of services to students. Achieving a critical mass for these services is important to encourage students to use the system as a hub for all class-related issues. This helps to relieve pressures on lecturing staff and ensure an even and fair level of service to all students.
Taxonomy Ireland
Taxonomy.ie is a online, collaborative system to aid in the identification of ecological specimens. It targets both students wishing to expand their classification skills as well as professionals wishing to build a taxonomical tree to help in the future identification of species.
Taxonomy App Screenshot
Taxomony.ie is a NDLR-IT Sligo funded initiative championed by Declan Feeney, Department of Environmental Science. It represents an ambitious collaborative effort to build taxonomies to aid students in the identification of ecological specimens.
Initially to be used for documenting waterborne insects from Irish lakes and rivers, the system is being developed to permit others to co-operate in the building of taxonomy keys for other groups as diverse as algae, moths or clouds. Populating of the taxonomy keys will be managed by experts in that genus and students can explore the keys through their browser.
The underlying delivery platform is particularly advanced for an application of this nature. The client side (as experienced by users) is driven by Silverlight 4, the latest release which enables rich animated features (to encourage student use), printing ability (to help trace identification), and sophisticated interactive controls to assist in the navigation of the key. Standard web development solutions (such as PHP/CSS) would not be capable of rendering these features to the same extent.
At the back-end, we have worked with our hosting service (Blacknight) to bring forward their deployment of .NET 4.0 framework which provides for (among other things) our use of RIA Services. RIA Services is Microsoft’s leading remote data service framework enabling us to securely and centrally house all application data while delivering it on demand to local users to browse or update.
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