Teachpoint servers

Much of the functionality of Teachpoint is implemented by a Teachpoint server. A Teachpoint server is currently implemented as a CGI program invoked from an HTTP server such as Apache.

Each Teachpoint server can handle one or more courses. Its structure is as follows: Picture: Teachpoint server DB server (mySQL) stores student registration info view log review schedule file cache stores course documents lesson, exercise documents Student interface (browser)

When a student does something (such as clicking a Next button for a lesson) this invokes a Teachpoint server. The server does the following:

• It verifies the student's identity by parsing the cookie passed from the browser and looking up the student in the registration database.
• It updates the record in the view log describing the page view just completed by the student.
• It decides what page the student should be shown next.
• It reads the XML document for that page from its cache, processes it, and generates the HTML that is returned to the student's browser.
• It creates a record in the view log describing the new page.