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March 2009 Calendar

CS Masters' Thesis Defense

Title: A Wiki-Enriched Dynamic Help System for an AJAX-based Web Application
Speaker: Farhana Chowdhury
Date: Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Time: 1:00 p.m.
Location: GMCS 408
Thesis advisor: Dr Subrata Bhattacharjee

Abstract:
ClassTA is a Course Management System that is designed to help students and educators organize their teaching efforts. ClassTA is an AJAX-based web application, so the application does not load as static webpages on the client side. Instead ClassTA only fetches core data from the server and redraws the browser window throughout the session. This causes responses of user actions to be almost instantaneous because it cuts the time taken by the browser to request a full webpage and the time taken by the server to send a full webpage to the browser. This instant response behavior gives ClassTA the look and feel of a desktop application.

To accustom users with the rich functionalities, new features and possible uses of ClassTA, an equivalently rich Help System has been designed. The Help System can render itself depending upon the context it has been asked. Context sensitive help provides more accurate help to users. Since ClassTA is an AJAX-based web application, the context sensitive Help System, being embedded inside ClassTA, is also AJAX-based. The Help System takes advantage of being an AJAX based system. It does not store help content as a collection of static web pages; instead, it fetches only plain text help content and renders this content dynamically in the browser with the help of JavaScript. The result of dynamically generating help content is a rich desktop-like experience.

The main advantage of the Help System is that it can be edited by distinguished users of ClassTA. The Help System has embedded “wiki” which lets users add new content to existing content and add new help topics. The wiki also allows users to add images and videos to Help Documents. This tool makes it easy for maintaining the Help System because distinguished users can change any part of a help content if the information changes. Also, as ClassTA grows, users can enrich the Help System with the new functionalities of ClassTA by adding new topics dynamically to the Help System. Most important of all, the Help System provides a rich user interface for users to view and edit help documents. Combining all the above features, results in a Help System that is “wiki” enriched, dynamically generated and context sensitive.
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