school-data-systems.org    

Credits

All these things that can make our lives as teachers easier are only possible because of so much work done by the open source community in producing excellent free software (free as in freedom).

Below is an acknowledgement of the groups of software developers that enable us to design and set up these educational systems with no software costs or expensive license fees. Click the logos on this page to be taken to these software project's websites.

If you are setting up a system on your own, you will want to visit these groups websites to get the latest versions. Please support open source software in any way you can.

Linux is the free operating system that we run on our servers. We use the Fedora Core distribution of it but any flavour will do the job just as well. It is the foundation of all our software.

All our systems rely on having good web server software running on the data-system machine. We design all our softwarer for the apache web server.

GNU. What more can be said. We use software released under the GPL all the time for all our development and data transfer needs.

Almost every program that we write for our systems are coded in Perl. It is an incredibly powerful programming language that is perfectly suited to the sort of services we are offering.

MySQL is the popular database system that is the backbone of all our data systems. It integrates incredibly well with perl and PHP and is an amazingly fast standalone database.

All our systems use the Perl template toolkit. This excellent module for Perl allows us to seperate out our code from our html and structure our websites with reusable material. Every aspect of the data-system uses the template toolkit now.

Not really part of the server software, but this is used a lot at the development stage of our work so we wanted to give it credit here.

For links to the home pages of the front end software we recommend on school servers, go to the available systems page.