| Toastmasters International (TI) is a global non-profit educational organization providing an environment for adults to improve public speaking skills and leadership skills. District 85 is a branch of TI which is serving around 4,000 members in 200 clubs of mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau. With the fact that the numbers of clubs and members in District 85 are increasing gradually, the weekly club meetings could not meet the requirements of members to communicate and share experience with each other, and the workload of District 85 officers serving these clubs and members is getting heavier and heavier. With the boom of the Internet applications such as microblog in China recently, the officers of District 85 realized that a good Internet application system could help members to communicate with each other effectively, and help them to manage information of the District. The District 85 officers asked me to implement a Web application to meet communication and experience-sharing requirements in short term, and gain experience of implementing a Management Information System (MIS) for the District in the future.There are three solutions to meet the short term and long term goals above. The first one is to use free online systems, such as free Blog or Wiki systems. The second one is to use open-source systems, such as open-source online forum systems. These two solutions could make members to communicate with each other to some extent, but both of them could not meet the long-term requirement of MIS. The third solution is to design and develop an in-house online forum system (EI Online Sharing Community, EOSC) at first, and then implement a MIS system basing on it in the future. The third one is feasible but to achieve it another three specific requirements must be met. First, be rapid and effective. The developer of this system is only me and I have to work on it in my spare time as a volunteer. The methodologies of the design and development of this system must be rapid and effective due to limited human resource. Second, information accessed securely. This system must have functions for administrators to manage users, roles and privileges. Anonymous users cannot access some contents of this system. Third, easy to be refactored. The source code of this system could be refactored and maintained easily to cope with changes of requirements in the future MIS development.The major work of this thesis is to find methodologies to meet the three specific requirements above during designing and developing a Java based online forum for District 85, and laying foundations for long-term MIS development.In the requirement definition and analysis phase of this system, ICONIX method was used to generate just enough design documentation with iterative and incremental development methodology, saving a lot of time. In the coding phase, AppFuse 2.1 framework was used to integrate Struts 2, Spring 3 and Hibernate 3 effectively with all source code including modules of user management and access control. AppFuse supports MVC Model 2 design pattern, test-driven development and decoupling of persistence layer, service layer and Web layer, which is helpful for code refactoring and maintenance. |
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