Alumni Database

Type:

Alumni database

Client:

St. Aloysius High School alumni database, Bandung

Trisakti University alumni database, Jakarta

Technology:

PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript

Started as two small web sites to collect and share email of alumni of St. Aloysius High School, Bandung and Trisakti University, Jakarta, now both of them have evolved into interactive web sites manage more than 3000 alumni records.

Back to the year of 1997 when these web sites were implementing only client-side JavaScript and HTML, since the record kept in the system were less than 100 alumni. As Internet grows and reach more people, there were a lot of new alumni aware about these web sites. Beside that, both of the web sites were listed in Yahoo Directory which also affected the traffic, and then the system dealt with up to 500 alumni records.

It was decided in 1999 to develop a small database application that can cope with bigger number of alumni and can deliver more interactive features in the web sites. ASP and Microsoft Access were chosen as the technologies and sites were hosted in a US based Windows NT server.

One year later, we found a local and reliable web hosting services who offered less cost on hosting fee but reputable for their good performance and support. Even though the servers they have are Linux servers, they install ChiliSoft ASP so it is possible to host ASP web applications on top of it. After a short period but extensive research, both web sites were successfully migrated to this new Linux server. As the result, an article about migrating ASP application to Linux server has been written, and Indonesian version of it called Migrasi aplikasi ASP ke Linux server also available.

Considering that PHP and MySQL are more suitable for Linux server web applications and the needs to enhance the features offered in the web sites, we rewrote the whole web sites using PHP as the scripting language and MySQL as the database.

The new code is reusable and quite generic to handle two different types of alumni database. St. Aloysius High School database implements year of graduation for junior and senior high school while Trisakti University employs year enrolled, year graduated and major in the database. The new feature to prevent spammers from harvesting email addresses from the database was also introduced. Since then it is pretty safe to register email address without being worry of the email address being published.