Abstract:
The Vocational Training Authority of Sri Lanka (VTA) was established in July 1995 under the
provisions of the Vocational Training Authority of Sri Lanka Act, No. 12 of 1995, with the
objective of providing job oriented training especially to the rural youth. The VTA offers skills
training through a network of 4 National Vocational Training Institutes, 14 District Vocational
Training Centers, 6 Special Vocational Training Centers, and 199 Rural Vocational Training
Centers.
There is an existing web system developed and maintained by the VTA consisting only of
static HTML based applications. The administration plans to upgrade it to a new site containing dynamic components in order to cut down the extra money spent on the posters, news paper advertisements, seminars and to address a wider audience as well as to provide online registration facilities to their courses. The existing system is also found to be time consuming and reliable performance cannot be expected.
In order to eliminate the drawbacks in the existing system, it is proposed to develop a
web site and web based student information system using PHP scripting and MySQL database technology. Linear sequential model (waterfall approach) and prototype model were used for the system development process. Initially feasibility study and the requirement analysis was done to gather the end user requirements. According to the data gathered by interviewing VTA staff and students, it was decided to develop the current website using distributed development tools like web development tools. In the designing stage, user interfaces, database of the system, were designed according to the user requirements by using Entity Relationship(ER) modeling diagrams, Use Cases were created by the Microsoft Visio 2003 tool. After the designing phase the system was implemented using web based server side scripting language PHP (Hyper Text
Preprocessor) and JavaScript as the client-side scripting language. The database was
implemented using MySQL and data manipulation was done using Structured Query Language (SQL). User Interface generation, hyperlink setting and image manipulations were implemented using Photoshop 7.0 and Dreamwcaver MX authoring tool. WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP5) Web Server was used as the testing server since it allows managing WAMP5 and accessing all Services. After coding, components were tested individually and finally integrated into the system.
At the final evalualion of development process the main purpose of the project was
achieved and tlicdicril was satisfied with the functionalities, usability, security and reliabilily of the new system.
