SchoolTool is an open source school management information system. It is a distributed client/server system. The SchoolTool server presents two interfaces to clients:
a traditional web application interface, usable with an ordinary browser.
HTTP-based programming interface suitable for fat clients, adhering to the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style (see http://rest.blueoxen.net/).
The web application interface is the primary one. The RESTive interface is there for potential interoperability with other systems and fat clients to perform data entry that is inconvenient to do via the web application interface.
There are several clients that demonstrate the usage of the REST interface (a command-line client that is used for functional tests, a wxWidgets GUI client, and a command-line client for data import).
Any modern web browser is suitable for the web application interface. The interface degrades gracefully, so a browser that does not support CSS or Javascript will be usable, although perhaps not very nice or convenient.
