White's ability to use Cold Fusion to put together a working Web app in less than 5 minutes caught Halstead's attention immediately. Since then, Halstead has stayed busy developing a range of Web applications that have dramatically improved the way his own organization manages communications. This replaces the time consuming and cumbersome process of manually coding HTML pages, as faculty and staff of the center submit information and requests. Now the center's many databases, including public relations, events, publications, and personnel, are mediated by a Web server which creates the HTML coded pages and displays them as fast as faculty and staff enter their information in a secure forms area of the site. The events calendar is one example of a tedious process that has been replaced by a dynamic Web application.
Users can view events on a graphical map, enter key word searches to find events, or search by date.
The information is accessible instantly as the person posting the information fills in the information form, and the key word indexing is updated on the fly. Web Apps in the Curriculum Developing Web applications that deliver student services and streamline communications processes are of great interest among IT professionals in higher education. And there is similar urgency to create applications that support collaborative learning and distance education. Around the country, there are many applications already in use that are natural progressions from posting static course information to allowing access to multimedia databases that support the syllabus. You probably remember language lab.