Software Architectures and Requirements for a Web-Based Survey System

Abstract

Many businesses obtain feedback by surveying customers and business partners. Increasingly, these surveys are conducted via the Web. This chapter reviews briefly literature regarding Web-based surveys and describes a software architecture for a Web-based survey system. The architecture for the survey system is based on three-tiers comprised of a Web server, Web application server, and database server. The Web application server hosts the application modules that display and process the surveys. The application software consists of packages for establishing connections to the database and for reading static and dynamic data from the database. The processed surveys are written to the database with the survey responses. This system allows for anonymous survey responses and maintains user confidentiality. At the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, we have implemented this Web-based survey system, and used it to conduct three different surveys. This survey system is easily extensible to new surveys, and is used for instructional purposes to teach server-side programming. In this chapter, we discuss the key ideas behind the design and implementation of the extensible survey system, and provide results on its application.