Form responders: Enhancing student learning in beginning and advanced Web development classes

Journal of Information Systems Education, 2002 by Lomerson, William L

Teaching Tip

ABSTRACT

Throughout the higher education community there is an increasing presence of courses that strive to introduce students to the technology of the e-commerce environment at a variety of instructional levels. The content of these courses ranges from augmenting an introductory course on computer productivity tools with a segment on auto web formatted documents to senior and graduate level courses that address the full three-tier model of an e-commerce system. This paper examines the benefits and shortcomings of the common methods used to demonstrate web site interactivity using HTML forms. The paper also presents a simple and effective instructional tool that enhances the student's understanding and development of interactive web sites using HTML forms. The tool consists of a simple server side ASP program, which can be easily implemented by the instructor, that responds directly and immediately to a form action request submitted by a web user.

Keywords: web teaching tool, Internet development, HTML forms, e-commerce teaching

1. INTRODUCTION

With the proliferation of e-commerce and the utilization of Internet technologies within public and private organizations, higher education faces a growing need to prepare students to work with these evolving technologies. Colleges and universities have responded by offering a variety of courses at various levels throughout the curriculum. The content of these courses ranges from augmenting an introductory course on computer productivity tools with an automatically generated web formatted document to senior and graduate level courses that address the full three-tier model of an e-commerce system. At each of these levels instructors attempt to develop a robust learning environment that includes enabling students to experience web site interactivity. This paper examines the most common methods of teaching HTML form functionality, which is used extensively in e-commerce applications to provide website interactivity. It also identifies the shortcomings of the common methods for demonstrating this interactive functionality. Following this analysis, a more effective operational solution to demonstrate this functionality is presented. This discussion assumes that the reader has a working knowledge of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) in general and the FORM tag specifically.

For beginning HTML students, the tool outlined enables them to immediately see the results of the data acquisition and submission features of a correctly built form, just as it would be implemented in a real interactive web environment. For advanced web students, the tool enables them to determine that their form is submitting data as intended in the designed name-value pairs without having their server side processing (database, etc.) completely operational. Determining the data values provided by a form can be a very difficult problem to isolate during the development of advanced client server interactions.

2. BACKGROUND

One of the key benefits of the web environment is the ability to support interactive content. Because of this benefit, any course dealing with the development of a web site quickly advances to the stage of creating an interactive web environment. The first stage of web site interaction occurs when the web client sends a request for a new web page or a different URL to the web server. This action is very simple and achieved using the hyperlink anchor tag, .

The second stage of web site interaction occurs when the web user needs to send specific information to a program on the web server. The HTML form tag, , is the primary element that handles the interactive transfer of user information from the client to the server. While most HTML tags can be adequately demonstrated using only the browser on the client computer, the FORM tag requires an interaction with the Internet environment in order to fully demonstrate its functionality.

The FORM tag has two distinct operating phases: the presentation/data collection phase and the submission/processing phase. The first phase is handled entirely by the browser and its results are displayed in the browser window. The second phase, which is the reason for including forms in the web page, provides for collecting information from the user and submitting it to a non-HTML application for processing. These applications are normally stored on a server that is external to the client (e.g., an Active Server Page (ASP) database maintenance program).

3. COMMON METHODS

Introductory HTML courses and textbooks handle this second phase processing in a variety of ways. Some skirt this issue by stipulating that the processing is being handled by another organizational department and thus can be ignored by the developer/student. This approach is not very satisfactory for most instructional approaches since it does not provide the student with a complete understanding or appreciation of a form's purpose within a web site.

A more widely used approached is to use the "mailto" feature in the action attribute of the form. When the user submits a form with a mailto action, an email message is prepared and sent from the user to the designated email recipient. While this approach has some limited applicability in the "real world," and can therefore be marginally justified pedagogically, it has several significant operational deficiencies.