Web Survey Bibliography
Survey data collection over the Internet is an increasingly important technique. With the release of Blaise 4.8 in July 2007, the Blaise community has a much improved and more powerful system for web surveys. Blaise 4.8 enables development of web questionnaires and administration of surveys across a wide range of requirements—from small to large sized questionnaires and from small to large sized numbers of survey takers. Central to web survey implementation is providing the web server infrastructure to support peak numbers of survey users. With version 4.8, Blaise has made major improvements to server-side responsiveness, robustness and scalability. An individual web server can support all functions for small to medium applications and user volume. For large scale situations multiple servers can be integrated to support web, database, and rules services suitable for the application. Determining in advance whether a given server system is sufficient to support a web survey’s requirements is critical for planning and configuration. Web stress testing systems are designed to address this important issue. We discuss here methods and applications using a web application stress test system with Blaise IS. While we present results of stress tests, our main focus is the methods used. The results are highly dependent on the size and complexity of the data models as well as the server platform. In other words, your mileage may vary.