A Comparative Analysis of Java Servlets and PHP in Web-based Plans of Study

Elizabeth Blythe, Carlie Bower, Sarah Shoup, Julia Vaysburd

Overview:
The resources currently available to students and advisors for organizing plans of
study are buggy and archaic. Information is available on SSINFO, but it is too general to
provide good counsel to students or good management of data to advisors. It is neither
convenient nor efficient to continue to use the somewhat inaccurate information that
SSINFO provides, or to attempt to organize all information through time-consuming
paperwork. A more dynamic, web-based system would solve this problem, as well as
support features that are not realized in the current system.
We have attempted to solve this problem using two approaches of interfacing with
the Oracle server in a web-based implementation: Java Servlets and PHP. The core of our
research is focused on careful comparisons between the two approaches over several key
aspects. These include speed, efficiency, ease of use, robustness, security, and the ability
to handle multiple simultaneous users. The goal of the project was to provide a justified
recommendation to advisors of the best implementation for their needs.
Challenges:
Our group has not had previous experience with the programming of PHP or Java
Servlets, and few of us have had much experience with Oracle or databases. For this
reason, it was a challenge for us to complete the implementations of the plans of study
system.
We must also be very careful in our comparisons of the two implementations. It is
important when performing an experiment to compare the speed of each, for example, to
ensure that the setups for the experiments are identical for each implementation. We must
make every effort to ensure a fair and scientific comparison. Otherwise, it will be difficult
to be able to make an accurate conclusion from our results.
Approach:
We used many forms which are currently available in paper format as guidelines for
our interface. However, we modified them and implemented them in a more up-to-date
web-based form instead. Our hopes were that these modifications would enhance the
usability of the progress report already in use on SSINFO and correct the errors and
generalities its pages show. When creating these new pages, we were keeping in mind
the ease of updating the system in the future and also the ease of use for students and
faculty members. We began by gaining access to the Oracle server and soon after found
that Purdue did not support Java Servlets. From this point we downloaded multiple files
in an attempt to gain the usability and configurations required to continue research.
However, this proved to be much more complicated than anticipated. Since an important
factor that we were considering was ability to update the system easily, we decided to
simply concentrate our efforts on the PHP implementation.

Outcomes / Results:
As the goal of our research was to provide advisors and students with a more
effective and usable plan of study by providing a justified recommendation as to which
implementation would be preferable, we feel that a PHP implementation is obviously
preferable on the Purdue campus. This implementation was not only usable across
multiple platforms on which Java Servlets were not, but it also provided a much greater
opportunity for a follow-up group to jump into head-first as it is similar to programming
languages we are taught in classes. We have successfully learned to be competent with
both HTML and PHP in the course of our research and, in the greater scheme of things,
have become proficient with learning new programming languages in general. As a
conclusion to our project, we intend to invite advisors to try the new web-based
implementations and provide us with feedback as to which features they like, which
features they do not like, and any changes they would like to see made. We will make
these recommendations and our source code available to another research group in hopes
that eventually students and advisors, both in and out of the School of Science, will be
able to make the move from the archaic and extraordinarily general paper and SSINFO
versions to our new web-based implementation.
Distribution of Work:
We initially divided the components of our research between the four members of
our team. Two people worked exclusively on the PHP implementation while the other
two worked on the Java Servlets implementation. This would have worked well had the
Java Servlets been as easy to implement and develop as the PHP implementation. In the
end, we decided to combine efforts on the PHP implementation in order to completely
finish one implementation, as opposed to having two incomplete implementations.