Owner Loop Factory, Brussels | Commercial No | |
Type of site collaborative web 2.0 based learning platform Created by Rizzo, John and Brasseur, Nicolas | ||
This article is about the javablackbelt community website, not about the similarly named company branch.
Contents
The Javablackbelt community website was a website which supported java developers in keeping up to date with current Java technology.
Goals
To provide a dynamic skills management and progress tracking facility for Java developers.
History
JavaBlackBelt was started in 2004, but first notable press can be found in 2006. In 2006 there were 3,500 questions online. By the end of year 2009 there were 50,000 multiple choice questions, and 60,000 registered members. Around 1,000,000 answers were given each year to multiple choice questions.
In 2010, JavaBlackBelt was improved to host courses. Users could access multi-lingual courses and edit them to co-author the course material. A system of coaching enabled any user to offer his teaching services to others for free or for a fee.
In the Spring 2011, the small company behind JavaBlackBelt was acquired by ElementK, a 500 people US company specialized in e-learning. ElementK was heavily investing in the development to extend JavaBlackBelt to non I.T. domains. A few months later, in the fall of 2011, ElementK was acquired by Skillsoft, a cloud-based learning provider which stopped most ElementK initiatives, JavaBlackBelt included. The site was shut down January 31, 2013.
Progress Tracking
Newly registered member start with zero knowledge points and zero contribution points. Knowledge points are earned only by passing an exam. Contribution points can be earned in several ways by contributing to the community e.g. by creating new questions or creating objectives for upcoming exams. Notable authors and framework resp. free software developers can be rewarded with contribution points even if they haven't participated in the community directly. According to progress a member is rewarded with a belt as in various kinds of martial arts (white, yellow, orange, green, blue, brown, black). The black belt is obtained after around 20 successful on-line exams.
Criticism
At the beginning of October 2009 external criticism about the license under which JavaBlackBelt poses the community-generated questions came up.
Technical Issues
The site/platform has been run on Tomcat with PostgreSql as DB server. The Java code has been developed with the frameworks Hibernate and Spring. For the user interface, JSPs and Struts v1 later Struts v2 (WebWork) have been used. From 2009 on new user interface features are developed with Vaadin. At the end of 2009 the project counts 100,000 lines of code and the database contains 100 tables. In order to protect the community generated content database snapshots are created frequently in addition to the backup strategy provided by the webhoster.