RIA: Healthy Thinking Diary Application

Healthy Thinking Institute were developing an online eLearning course as part of their programme to help people cope with stress. Part of the course required that the users store their results they have captured through interactions throughout the course. At the same time, they should be able to store their own thoughts and feelings in an application for later review.

Client: Healthy Thinking Institute (via RWD Technologies NZ)
Sector: Health
Service Category: Rich Internet Application Development
On the web: N/A

The Challenge: Creating a database-driven Flash application that is completely integrated with another application, interacts and retrieves data from the host application, and interacts with another (non-standardised) system for getting user credentials required some planning. At the same time, the sub-project had to be carefully co-ordinated with the rest of the development effort.

Another competing requirement was coming from the vendor (RWD) as they wanted to be able to reuse the application on other projects, so re-usability and quick integration into other projects had to be considered at the same time. And finally, the current skill-set of the development team had to be considered as well, since they were comfortable with Actionscript 2 only.

The Solution: All the requirements were met after many revisions, and the result was a Flash-based, database-driven application that is integrated with the Healthy Thinking course. The application is made of a user interface for input and retrieval of data; a php middleware that transfers data between the application and the database; and a MySQL database that resides on the client’s servers. Application can be easily re-used and deployed in other courses quickly and with minimal effort. The logic being completely separate from the data, changing the user interface of the diary application should only take the effort of creating a new interface design. Overall, a relatively complex application with many competing requirements deployed successfully.

Services Provided: