The Web-based enrollment system aims to address the various perennial problems related to VSU’s enrollment: late submission of grades, student evaluation and the interactivity of the enrollment application. Each semester, continuing and freshmen students struggle over long queues for encoding, assessment, payment, printing of certificate of registration (COR). Recently, students population is steadily increasing that soon the current system may not be able to cope effectively and efficiently.
Slow system and back-end
Student Record Management System or SRMS was VSU’s enrollment system written in VBA(Visual Basic for Applications) and MS Access as it’s Backed and Database From 2004-2016. MS Access is a commercial database software distributed by Microsoft, both as front-end and backend. In MS Access, a single database has a “back-end” file which contains all the data in “tables” (shared on a file server) and a more user-friendly “front-end” file (containing the application’s objects such as queries, forms, reports, macros, and modules), which most users interact with to get the ‘data’ from the tables at the back-end. The “front-end” Access application is distributed to each user’s desktop and linked to the shared database. This approach can be very vulnerable to hacking, data hijacking or even loss of data if somebody from the network gains access to the back-end file.
It was also limited to the Local Area Network and cannot be deployed to the Internet because it will consume a lot of bandwidth for data transfer. This application is also limited to 10-18 concurrent users and the system tends to lock itself when it reaches its limit. It also lacks the ability for the students and the teaching staff to have an account to view their grades or encode the grades on real-time.
The issues pertaining to MS Access was eliminated by rewriting the whole core system into a web-based technology. The new enrollment system was developed using Ruby on Rails or known as “Rails” Framework. Ruby on Rails, or simply Rails, is an open source web application framework written in Ruby. “Rails” is a full-stack framework that emphasizes the use of well-known software engineering patterns and paradigms, including convention over configuration (CoC), don’t repeat yourself (DRY), the active record pattern, and model–view–controller (MVC).