CHAPTER 25

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1. An e-learning portal has to provide a user-friendly interface to make learning a pleasant experience. E-learning has many advantages. You can learn at your own pace at a time of your convenience. You need not always be at the same place and you can access the portal from anywhere on Earth. However, e-learning has some drawbacks, too. You cannot have face-to-face interactions with the instructors, and hence you need to use facilities such as e-mail, and chat to interact with the instructors and other students. E-learning is now catching up very fast, and M.S. and M.B.A. degrees are being offered by leading universities through e-learning mode.

2. An e-learning portal must have the following modules:

   • An e-lecture module that delivers the lecture material. The lecture material has to be supplemented with lecture notes. The lecture notes can be read by inserting voice files in the presentation.

   • E-mail module for interaction between the students and the instructors.

   • Chat module for online chatting among the students and the instructors.

   • Online examination module to test the students.

   • An electronic notice board to make announcements periodically.

   • A database module that stores complete information about the various students.

   • A virtual laboratory module that facilitates experimentation.

3. To learn scientific and engineering concepts, laboratory work plays an important role. To facilitate hands-on lab work in e-learning, virtual laboratories are used. As an example, suppose you want to learn about digital signal processing. Through the e-learning mode, you learn a lot of theory on DSP. But unless you write some DSP code and run it, you will not get a good understanding of the theory. You can use a virtual lab-a DSP kit will be connected to the server in which the e-learning portal is hosted. You can write the code, run it on the DSP kit, and view the results on your screen. So, even if you do not have a DSP kit, you gain experience on using it-that is the power of virtual laboratories. You can use the virtual laboratory provided on http://www.techonline.com.

4. Web services use XML, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), and UDDI for directory service. Sun ONE development tools and Web Sphere are used for developing the Web services. You can obtain the details from http://www.sun.com, http://www.ibm.com, http://www.microsoft.com.

5. What are J2EE, J2SE, and J2ME?
   J2EE stands for Java 2 Enterprise Edition and is used to develop enterprise applications. Using J2EE SDK, you can develop server components such as Java Server Pages, servlets, and Enterprise Java Beans. J2SE stands for Java 2 Standard Edition and is used to develop Java applications on desktops. J2ME stands for Java 2 Micro Edition and is used to develop applications for small devices such as mobile phones, pagers, and PDAs. Such devices have small memory and small display, and also do not have secondary storage such as hard disk. For such devices, a small Java Virtual Machine, known as Kilobytes Virtual Machine (KVM), is developed by Sun Microsystems.

6. XML is a markup language. It is a meta-language-you can develop new markup languages using XML. WML, XHTML, SyncML, and VoiceXML are derived from XML.

7. A networked information appliance is a device that is networked using TCP/ IP protocols. Consider a Web camera. The Web camera can have the necessary hardware and software to run the TCP/IP protocol stack software and the HTTP server software. So, the Web camera is an embedded system that acts as a Web server. The Web camera can be connected to the Internet. Anyone can access the Web camera through the Internet. The Web camera can be installed in a floor of a factory to monitor the functioning of important equipment. Such devices are called networked information appliances. Networked information appliances can be of great use to obtain real-time weather information, monitoring of important systems in nuclear plants, and so forth.

8. For many governments throughout the world, e-governance is the buzzword. In all countries, decision-making by governments is very slow. E-governance is a concept that facilitates collection of the right information by governments, use of that information for better planning, execution of plans through electronic monitoring, and so forth. The citizens can be benefited immensely by e-governance. Payment of taxes can be done very easily. Even obtaining birth certificates, driving license, and so on, governments are providing Internet-based services. Using the Internet, the government departments can disseminate the information so that the governments becomes more transparent. In a truly democratic setup, the government can obtain feedback on proposed legislation using electronic means.

9. In Internet voting, citizens can vote sitting at their place of work or at their homes. However, it is a long way before Internet voting is used by governments due to security reasons.

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