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About BingBuilder
BingBuilder is a course registration aid designed specifically for students of Binghamton University. The main motivation for the creation of BingBuilder was the renovation of the registration system at Binghamton, moving into the Banner system of BU BRAIN. For many people, BU BRAIN is difficult to use and lacks many of the user-friendly features that BUSI offered. So a program was developed to allow students to navigate departments and courses easily and still be able to view and edit their current schedule, something that BUSI did not offer nor any other current registration tool available. BingBuilder does not actually register students for their classes, but instead provides them with a tool to build schedules quickly and easily. To facilitate the transition of scheduling courses and actually registering for them, a list of course reference numbers (CRNs) is provided with the intention of using BU BRAIN's option to add a course by CRN.
BU BRAIN and the Fall 2008 schedule were released to students on March 10, 2008 and BingBuilder.com was created on March 20, 2008. On March 31, BingBuilder began promoting and opened officially, with the help of a small crew of students. Most of the design and programming for BingBuilder started after BU BRAIN's inception, so the key focus of the operation was to simply get a working version of the schedule builder running by the end of spring break. There are still dozens of features that are in development and they will be released into the Builder shortly. Some important features still to come are the ability to drag and drop courses on the schedule grid to switch sections and the ability to search for a course by its specific attributes such as time of day, credits, GenEd, and so on. Being a collaboration of ideas from Binghamton students, we are open to ideas and comments for new features. Being so early in the development process, this is the best time to come up with new ideas and make BingBuilder into a student-involved tool that everyone has a hand in. We are taking idea submissions by both email and the feedback form.
On the outside, BingBuilder uses Adobe Flash applications to display the schedule builder and other various components. Adobe Flex Builder 3 is used to create these applications, written in ActionScript 3.0. Flex is a cutting-edge rich internet application (RIA) development program that is worth a few hundred dollars, but free for students. Other tools that are used are Java, Python, PHP, and MySQL. In accordance with the belief of the open flow of information on the internet, many of BingBuilder's data files are available "open source" for anyone interested. One directory of interest would be assets/. To preserve our intellectual property rights, we ask that you do not remove the disclaimer, which states that the files were generated for and by BingBuilder.
