Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Página 454 de 957
Figure 1: Applet corrector user interface. The visualization panel on the left shows a 60 question with 4
options answer sheet template.
Security configuration
The tool operation requires reading and writing files in the user’s computer, the main file
operations are: writing the answer sheet templates, reading the solution and exam files
and writing the corrected answer sheets and the score file. Java security has to be
configured in order to allow the corrector applet to access to the local file system.
We have made Java security configuration completely user transparent by implementing a
Java application that performs all the required operations. The configuration application is
delivered as a ZIP file that contains the Java code packed in a JAR file and two script files, a
BAT file for Windows and a shell file that is used in Linux and MacOS. The user simply
downloads the ZIP file from a public URL and then the file is decompressed in a folder and
after executing the corresponding script file a window is opened asking for accepting
security configuration. When the user presses the Accept button, the following two
operations are performed:
1. A folder named corrector is created in a predefined location depending on the
operating system (i.e. in Windows 7 the path is %userprofile%\corrector). This is
the root working folder for the tool, in the sense that every exam will be processed
in a subfolder of it. The corrector folder is always created in a location where the
user has no file access restrictions.
2. A .java.policy file is created (or updated if there exists a previous one) in order to
grant permission to the corrector applet to access to some system properties (i.e.
the host operating system name, the user home folder path, etc) and to read, write
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011