University of Vienna

The University of Vienna required a robust and fit for purpose management system to address the day to day running of this thriving learning environment. It has 9400 employees attending to 91,000 enrolled students taking 188 courses of which 56 are Bachelor Programmes, 117 Master Programmes, 4 Diploma Programmes and 11 PhD Programmes.  They use a solution built on LiveCode to manage all this. We spoke to Hartmut Eich, from the software development team at the University about their choice of LiveCode.

“The project originated as a system for the creation of a database-based applications. One of the key features of the system is the way that the data and the code is stored in the database itself. The database stores all of its own meta-structure – a description of the table structure, together with the relationships between the tables, along with all the code for the user interface.”

The LiveCode written system includes a module to perform any task necessary for operating a large University. Notable modules include:

• A scheduler for course timetables
• A room allocation system
• The enrolment details for every student
• Staff Payroll

There are half a million lines of LiveCode in 43,000 procedures and functions in the system. These have been built as approximately 1300 fully independent modules, each of which is stored in an Oracle database.

Hartmut told us: “LiveCode was an ideal choice for this project for many reasons. At the heart of the system is an augmented version of SQL that ties SQL together with the LiveCode language model. This is essentially a domain-specific language, tailored to fully support the needs of this application.”

“We upgraded to the latest version of LiveCode to take advantage of the Unicode improvements that have been incorporated over the years. New legislation means that we have to be able to represent a student’s name within the system correctly in their native language.”

“Another key benefit is the ability to fully customize the development environment. Our system uses its own customized set of tools, including a Code Editor written for the project. The editor cross-references the code stored in the database, making it easy to navigate the huge code-base contained across all the modules and to make changes. The LiveCode development environment is written in itself and we wanted to integrate the latest version of the LiveCode Integrated Development Environment tools into our system.”

“ Vienna University have multi-user development license for LiveCode. Their in-house team keeps the system up to date and adapts it to the changing requirements of the University. The design of the system makes it easy for a team to work on the project. Each module is completely independent and stored in the Oracle database. This makes it straightforward to work on it in parallel.”