Framework for rapid in-house development of web applications for higher education institutions in Poland

Abstract

1. ABSTRACT
USOS [2] is a student management information system developed in-house for higher education
institutions (HEIs) in Poland, from the MUCI consortium. It consists of a desktop application
developed in Oracle technology for the university administration, and a suite of web based
applications, for handling admission, course registration, grades, student diploma theses, social aid,
course surveys and many other services, dedicated for students and university teachers. They were
developed in the last ten years in such technologies as PHP, Smarty, JavaScript and Ajax. Recently
the system designers decided to rewrite some of them from scratch. They chose Django as the
framework for the new software. While designing the software architecture they recognized
functionalities which might be shared among various applications and decided to gather them in a
separate framework on which some of the future web applications for USOS might be based. In such
a way Django USOS framework was born. This framework may be used not only by the team of USOS
developers but also by programmers developing local applications for the universities from the
consortium, either in-house or with the help of independent suppliers.