Adobe Success Story

Benefits

Project Details

The reduced development time, ease of use, and the ability to communicate easily with our JAVA platform make Flash MX/Flash Remoting MX an excellent solution for building Rich Internet Applications. Tim Chi, Senior Director of Technology

One of the key features of this Blackboard platform is the ability to develop mini-applications called "Building Blocks." Blackboard Building Blocks is a free framework for developing external applications and "hooking" them directly into Blackboard. More specifically, the Blackboard Building Blocks framework provides an API suite and documentation for packaging and deploying applications within the Blackboard platform. Blackboard Building Blocks allows third-party vendors, developers, and institutions to use the Blackboard platform to build new applications, extend existing technologies, and integrate them into external (back-office) systems.

The Group Management Tool allows faculty to create and manage course study groups. For example, Biology 101 has 300 students enrolled, as well as two instructors and six teacher's assistants (TA). Someone must create the study groups and assign group membership. Instead of manually creating and assigning groups for 300 students, instructors and TAs can use Blackboard's Group Management Tool.

Recently, its clients had asked Blackboard to improve the group management feature. Built in HTML, the existing group management feature had a clunky interface and was slow to respond to user requests. Overseas users who primarily used dial-up connections were dealing with an even slower response rate.

Teaming up with Fig Leaf Software and Macromedia MX Strategic Services, Blackboard sought out to jointly develop a Macromedia Flash-based System Extension that could leverage the power of the Macromedia Flash environment and use the hooks that were available using the Blackboard Building Blocks API.

In improving the Group Management Tool, Blackboard had the following objectives:

• Streamlined server-side development and QA process
  
• Optimized application performance
  
• Designed more intuitive interface so that the tool was easy to use
  
• Ability to drag and drop users into study groups eliminates screens, pages refreshes, and click throughs
  
• Add functionality that could not be implemented with HTML such as randomization
  
• Reduce the number of necessary application screens
  
• Enable parallel design and development

Communication

The first problem that Blackboard encountered was identifying a way for the Macromedia Flash client to be able to communicate with the Java Building Blocks layer.

Flash Remoting MX provides a single API for calling remote services and XML documents from within Macromedia Flash MX. It exposes application APIs to Macromedia Flash MX as simple ActionScript APIs. "When I saw how straightforward it was to pass data created in Java back to ActionScript - I was blown away," said Timothy Chi, Senior Director of Technology, Blackboard Inc.

"Flash Remoting MX allows us to focus on the business logic and not on the nuts and bolts of how data and objects are being passed back and forth. It also cuts the communication development and debugging time in half and makes knowledge transfer very simple with its detailed documentation," said Daniel Cane, Senior Vice President of Research & Development, Blackboard Inc.

Deployment

The Blackboard platform uses the WebLogic application server. So, Blackboard had to find a way to allow Macromedia Flash Remoting MX to access local Java objects.

Macromedia Flash MX applications can use Flash Remoting MX to exchange data with remote services, including ColdFusion components and pages, EJBs, Java classes, and .NET components and pages. It also enables Macromedia Flash MX to easily connect to any web service without any additional server-side development.

For the Group Management Tool a new Java class on the WebLogic server interacts with Building Blocks on behalf of the Flash client. Flash Remoting MX uses the existing HTTP session to connect these components.

Results

With the assistance of Fig Leaf and Macromedia MX Strategic Services, Blackboard completed the enhanced Group Management Tool interface in just four weeks. (No plans yet to market this)

"The reduced development time, ease of use, and the ability to communicate easily with our JAVA platform make Flash MX/Flash Remoting MX an excellent solution for building Rich Internet Applications," added Chi.

End User Ease of Use

Perhaps the biggest benefit resulting from this project is the improvement in the ease of use for users of the Group Management Tool. The ability to drag and drop users into study groups eliminates screens (from 5 down to 1), pages refreshes, and click throughs. Plus, users go no longer have to sort students into groups themselves. With the randomization feature in the Flash versions of the Group Management Tool, a simple click of the button organizes them for the user.

"The new group manage tool is great -- faster and more intuitive. Because all the information is on one screen - I no longer have to click around, from page to page, looking for student information. And the system is so much faster. I'd enter information and it would take at least ten seconds for the page to refresh. Now I enter the information and it appears on my screen instantaneously." Dennis Coughlan, Faculty Support Specialist, University of Findlay.

Project Summary

Blackboard Inc.
1899 L Street NW, 5th Floor
Washington, DC 20036

Organization's industry: Education
Macromedia products: Macromedia Flash Remoting MX, Macromedia Flash MX
Hardware used for the application: Dual processor, Dell PowerEdge server, 1 Gig Memory
Operating system(s) for Macromedia products: Sun Solaris, Microsoft Windows 2000 and Redhat Linux
Database vendor: Oracle 8i and Microsoft SQL Server 2000
Development team: 3 Developers
Macromedia services: Macromedia MX Strategic Services
Macromedia Alliance Partner: Fig Leaf Software
Third-party products: WebLogic Express Application Server