A Robust and Scalable RESTful Web Service for Collecting Student Responses

Abstract

This paper discusses a model for a RESTful (Representational State Transfer) web service used in education. The “Student Response System” (SRS) has been developed and tested in classrooms for two years within the EduMecca project. The SRS provides a response system, accessible through mobile devices allowing students to submit virtually anonymous responses, i.e., other students are not able to see individual submissions. The system makes strong use of open and flexible standards to allow for external software to control the service with use-case specific interfaces. It is aimed to support as many students using the service in parallel as possible. In this paper, the main performance bottleneck of the system is examined in detail. In order to provide an easy-to-use interface, the mobile devices of the students need to be notified by the service about real-time changes of the data. The benchmark results indicate a high user capacity of the service. It is also a robust approach able to recover quickly after an unusual high request peak.