Jack Park
jackpark@thinkalong.com
Street address
Palo Alto, CA Zip


Date: Tue, 04 Sep 2001 16:04:57 -0700


Mr. Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net
The Welch Company
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111 2496

Subject:   Nexist

Hi Rod,

Many thanks for staying in touch.

Right now, the servlet necessary to allow Nexist to work on the Web is being a real hoot to program: not nearly as simple as I first thought it would be. It only works, sortof, and 'sortof' is not good enough.

Nexist is an Applet-Servlet system; a lightweight Java Applet is downloaded from the web page and it logs into a Servlet that then couples the Applet to Nexist itself. Servlets are funny things: they behave like one-shot affairs. You make a request, and the servlet makes a response. If Nexist can't get the response back to the servlet in time, the response dies. I found a way to program around that and am now testing it.

However, Nexist in the classroom is not a Web affair; Nexist works fine when you are just using Nexist applications on an intranet talking to a Nexist server elsewhere on the same intranet.

So, Nexist will, very soon now, see light in the classroom. As I understand things (given that my son is in the class that will use Nexist), they are presently using Jeff Conklin's QuestMap and learning how to do facilitated IBIS discussions. When one classroom wants to collaborate in discussion with classrooms elsewhere, then we will need Web capability.

More soon.

Cheers


Jack Park
jackpark@thinkalong.com