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Samxa is a XML based academic tests manager. Samxa manages all the process of creating, publishing, capturing results and generating statistics of different questions and tests. The core technologies underneath Samxa are XML documents and DSSSL for the formatting of the pages produced.
Samxa has been developed in Colombia by Fabio Arciniegas A. and it's currently a set of tools developed mainly in C++ and perl. Even though Samxa is evolving and new versions are expected, the current version is stable and features the complete functionality here described.
The intended public for Samxa is teachers and institutions willing to have both a very close control of questions/results and a rich environment that provides all the educational benefits of the WWW. Samxa is capable of producing classic written tests as well as highly powerful web pages for online tests. These generated pages include authentication mechanisms and all the correspondent methods for automatic evaluation. Results are -- if the user desires so -- sent back to Samxa, which again uses XML/DSSSL to save and present statistics.
Samxa illustrates many of XML current questions such as extraction of XML from databases, manipulation of XML using scripting languages on the client side, manipulation of XML data using DOM and SAX on the server side and the complications imposed by the need of different presentations and output formats for the data both inside and outside the web.
Samxa, now in version 2.1, has a somewhat extensive history of underlying parsers and tools. We believe this makes it a good example of the wandering a XML developer faces and therefore constitute an excellent real life comparison of the benefits and pitfalls of some of the most important XML tools available. The history of parsers and tools used in different versions of Samxa include: expat, XML::parser for perl, IBM's xml4c2 parser, Microsoft's XSL engine and jade.
Finally, we want to point out the following facts: (1) Samxa is a useful real-life XML product for non-XML people. In that respect, Samxa is another proof of the applicability of XML. (2) Samxa has been developed in Colombia. In that respect, Samxa is another proof of the growing interest on XML as a global standard, not as a curiosity for a few top researchers in the USA.