engleski

Credit Card System for Subsidized Nourishment of University Students

Early in 1998 we committed ourselves to the task of computerizing the system of providing the subventionary nourishment to the university students in the Republic of Croatia. Initial assumptions were rather simple: a central database of students was to be established and faculties were supposed to be permanently connected to Croatian academic network (CARNET) to maintain the data. The faculties were to collect only the basic information about students, assign levels of rights, make a digital photo and connect it to a student's record. The student identification cards were to be printed out of the database, and students were to use the identification cards at restaurants where a check was to be done whether they have consumed their daily quota. The students objected to these simple initial assumptions regarding them as a loss of their rights, so the system had to grow in complexity, almost to resemble a banking business today. Moreover, being disappointed both with low availability and performance of CARNET at the majority of sites, we had to develop a heterogeneous distributed database scheme and develop proprietary replication mechanism, capable to exchange high volumes of data over a slow network or over Dial-Up networking.

Credit cards; distributed databases; replication

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