Thanks Shawn. I vetoed the idea eons ago unless he could come up with mucho dollars for me to hire a VB person to develop it, as CF is just not the tool. He also hates the idea of the CD frankly, as it puts pedagogy he's spent a fortune developing into the hands of people who ( no matter how inventive we are ) can copy it to others. But, we are a very small firm and there are a few very powerful, large, influential universities who have very specific demands, and if we want to survive we have to listen to those.
Some are things are a pain but I can deal with (some military schools for example want an Excel alternative to the primary statistics java app the whole site is integrated with); some demands, like the CD version, are close to unworkable without major funding. I recently told him I could put our 'printed' version in a few PDFs on a CD; this got out of hand -- he is a salesman and sometimes obtuse about tech -- and now a few customers are expecting a CD version of the course by June. (The funnier part is, he wants to wait a few months and see what interest there is, before finding the funding to help me begin! Well, that isn't going to work...) I don't want to create limits for this unless they really ARE good limits... your arguments are good, and thanks, they will go in my ammo box. :-) I am not the most experienced coder, I am constantly learning (and screwing up :-)), and I don't want my inexperience with such a project to make it sound unworkable if it really isn't. For all I knew, a few java applets or javascripts could handle it. If not, okay, now I know. I'm trying to work out just what I CAN do as far as a CD version goes. E.g., maybe NONE of the answers are submittable offline, but the Q&A itself shows up (without form submission) in simple static pages; maybe we only give feedback on the answers (that's how our system works, and I know of some javascripts that can do that fairly well even offline). The java applets are the biggest pain in the butt frankly, and our whole course is pretty much based on that interactivity so we can't toss it. But I know most of them work on a HD as we've put the previous-static site using them on our laptops to demo before. YES, it will be very specific -- probably PC/w modern IE/NS only. So the way I figure it, my only real problem is how to handle the lack of dynamic nature of the Q&A. And if I can't, then I can't, and I'll say so. But I thought the folks here, more experienced than I am, would have a better idea of what was possible... or at least, practical. The whole WDDX thing sounds nifty -- and makes my brain swim. I am so overworked right now I'm lucky to sleep at all -- I cannot add another project with a big learning curve to everything else on my plate. But it's useful to know, for future reference, that such things are possible. Thanks everyone for your feedback. I really appreciate it. Regards, Palyne ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This email server is running an evaluation copy of the MailShield anti- spam software. Please contact your email administrator if you have any questions about this message. MailShield product info: www.mailshield.com ----------------------------------------------- To post, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe / unsubscribe: http://www.dfwcfug.org
