How does Netsorting work?
The thecnology
Netsorting uses a three-tier architecture:
Client side
On the browser side Netsorting uses plain html. Some javascript code is used to allow the user to move the items from the starting list to the target lists and viceversa.
Server side: jsp
The server side is build up using the servlet / jsp technology. The pages run on a linux operative system. We use the sun java virtual machine, version 1.5; the servlet engine is jakarta-tomcat-5.0.16, the free opensource reference implementation developed by the apache foundation;
Database
The present version of Netsorting uses \hrefhttp://www.postgresql.org/postgresql, a free, opensource database.
The modules
Netsorting implements different modules and submodules. Three main groups of modules can be indentifyed: Netsorting is composed by three main section:
The logic
Netsorting is based on a number of classes of objects. The most important classes are:
- The editors. This class represents the set of persons who create and edit the experiments.
- The tests. Each test represents a knowledge domain (for instance a web site)
- The questionnaires. The questionnaires are the tools the editor can use to elicit the knowledge of the partecipants about a domain (the test). The free listing, the importance evaluation, the card sorting are different questionnaires that can be applied to the same test.
- The partecipants.
- The items to be evaluated and sorted.
- The groups for the closed card sorting.
