This university has 9400 employees attending to 91,000 enrolled students taking 188 courses of which 56 are Bachelor Programmes, 117 Master Programmes, 4 Diploma Programmes and 11 PhD Programmes.

The University of Vienna required a robust and fit for purpose management system to address the day to day running of this thriving learning environment. A solution built on LiveCode is used to achieve this, which has been running successfully for the last 20 years. We spoke to Hartmut Eich, from the software development team at the University about their choice of LiveCode.

The LiveCode system includes a module to perform any task necessary for operating a large University. Notable modules include:

• A scheduler for course timetables
• A room allocation system
• The enrolment details for every student
• Staff Payroll

There are half a million lines of LiveCode in 43,000 procedures and functions in the system. These have been built as approximately 1300 fully independent modules, each of which is stored in an Oracle database.

The project originated as a system for the creation of a database-based applications. One of the key features of the system is the way that the data and the code is stored in the database itself. The database stores all of its own meta-structure – a description of the table structure, together with the relationships between the tables, along with all the code for the user interface. LiveCode was an ideal choice for this project for many reasons. At the heart of the system is an augmented version of SQL that ties SQL together with the LiveCode language model. This is essentially a domain-specific language, tailored to fully support the needs of this application. We upgraded to the latest version of LiveCode to take advantage of the Unicode improvements that have been incorporated over the years. New legislation means that we have to be able to represent a student’s name within the system correctly in their native language.

LiveCode Ltd and the Vienna University team are currently working together to fully update this system and ultimately deliver a web version using the newest Create platform.