There are lot of courses being (or have been) taught at the University of Tartu. So, therefore a register for courses has been found. Until 1997 there was only one output from the register: catalogue “Lectures and practical works at University of Tartu”. But there were too few copies published (besides the price for catalogue was too high for students) and it is difficult to find a particular course from the catalogue. Therefore the WWW-interface for course registry was needed

WWW-interface is available from autumn of 1997. Users can perform several queries in course registry: courses can be found by name, by lecturer, by teaching language etc; those queries can be combined with each other.

Main idea of the system:

User fills in a form on the main page and sends data (through that form) to search page. On the search page the query is performed in database and all courses found are printed out in HTML-table format (HTML – HyperText Markup Language). Then user selects the course he is interested in, and follows the link to the course information page. In the information page, all currently available information about course is printed out.

Microsoft^® Active Server Pages on Microsoft^® Internet Information Server provides an easy way to write server-side scripts and it also provides an easy way to communicate with any kind of database through ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity) drivers.

The course registry is being managed with Microsoft^® Access database system.

All scripts in the WWW interface are written in Microsoft^® Visual Basic^® Scripting Edition (VBScript) – the newest member of the Visual Basic family of programming languages. VBScript was used, because it brings active scripting to a wide variety of environments, including WWW client scripting in Microsoft Internet Explorer and WWW server scripting in Microsoft Internet Information Server.