Technology

Basics

buzzard is a web application. This means you only need a webbrowser (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, Konqueror, you name it) to execute the application on the client side. You may install and use it only using one PC, or you use it in your local network, of you even have it accessable from internet.
Sure, the server needs to be set up once.

Behind the scene

buzzard is an application running on a servlet container. It uses a SQL database and OJB as a persistence manager layer. The application is entirely written in java. It was tested on tomcat and websphere .

Minimum setup

The minimum setup for the server is a small pc (PII 400MHz 256 MB), running linux, java, tomcat and ojb. You may run tomcat and ojb also on Windows platforms (but I cannot give you any support for that). You may (if you have the dimes) also use AIX, Solaris or bigger machines, though I doubt that this kind of iron is available on public schools ;-).

Costs, licenses

This is an open source project under the GPL license. You may use this program for free like in free beer. You may also get interested in the code (which is free like in free speech). You may also contribute any progresses, I think there is always something to do. If you get students interested in modern programming projects, feel free to let them participate in this.