Knowledge of students brings economy forward

The Hasso-Plattner-Institute (HPI) prepares IT-students practically to the professional world. From the bachelor project do also profit the cooperation partners from the economy.

The company TeleClix, which helps programme providers and distributors with the construction and the business of interactive television, has a clear instruction for the HPI project: TeleClix needs a prototype of a base system in order to convert multimedia content for the Multimedia Home Platform (MHP).

"The development of MHP contents with the in XML formulated language Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for the development of two-dimensional vector graphics was up to now limited to persons, disposing of experience in programming", said bachelor student Ralf Merettig. As MHP is based on Java, designers must give their ideas in the hands of programmers or must learn Java by themselves. Merettig:"This has now come to an end". Together with six fellow students, he developed during six months a content transformation system that allows the conversion of graphic content into MHP specific applications.

"At the beginning there is a SVG document, that besides a description of any graphic also allows, on the base of XML, animations and the embedding of logic with the help of scripts", so Merettig. The students convert the SVG document first in a self developed format with the specification MHP-DOM. Then, it is linked with a Xlet, that is adjusted to animations and scripts, to a full functional MHP application.

The clou: through a fully automated conversion manual intermediate steps are obsolete. All options can be configured comfortably over a graphic surface by the user himself. Alternatively, the programme can also be integrated into other applications, for example in the form of a plug-in.

Ebay-Powerseller

A totally different target group was focused by the bachelor project Smart Clients. Four students developed a software solution for the processing of business processes in connection with internet auctions on behalf of the Deutsche Post subsidary IT-solutions. In detail the students dealt with a solution, according to bachelor student Stefan Bär, in order to give Ebay-Powerseller a tool that enables them to do all steps, from the setting up of singular articles over the customer administration to the dispatch, without leaving home.

Significant feature of the HPI software development is according to Jürgen Dittrich, Chief Specialist for architecture and system design at IT-Solutions, that the user can do nearly all tasks offline, before transmitting the prepared data online to the server. And every powerseller can select these modules from a tool, that he wants to use. Christian Blees/rr