Stuart Sim's Blog

SAKAI - Open Source LMS or Developer Framework?

It's not fair to evaluate the current release candidate against the goals of the SAKAI program. It is widely accepted that these aims will not be realized until version 2.0 in the spring/summer of next year. The current release is a snapshot of the code base that will be deployed at the leading SAKAI contributing universities. This fact alone is a testament to the practical and real world applicability of the solution.

The community is tired of frameworks that have not be tested on the real world and the SAKAI program should be commended for their dual track of defining an open framework for educational tools and delivering a production system to prove its viability.

The problem is that the ‘open framework’ is already showing signs of the real world constraints it inherited for deployment. In every software project, the challenges of interoperability and deployment are at odds and compromises have to be made.

Much of the constraints inherited from both Chef (open source collaboration tool) and uPortal (open source portal) are evident in the current code snapshot and it will take some time and effort to unwind them.

SAKAI uses the Spring Framework to define the loose coupling between components in the framework. The use of Spring and similar lightweight containers is a good approach for loose binding components without the need for a full J2EE container. What is not clear is the value the SAKAI framework would provide over an above Spring itself. Spring is a development framework and, it it’s current state, so is SAKAI.

Working towards two separate but connected goals in parallel is no easy task. Thats before you add software.

Lets hope those waiting outside expectantly (myself included) give the team enough breathing room to define the information models and business tier that will allow us to plug in our own teaching and collaboration tools.

Comments

• Where is the documentation?
  For being a $6.8m project, i'd appreciate some documentation. Where are the requirements? Are they just producing code with no goal?

  And what is a "Cover" as they are refering to in the javadocs. "DiscussionService is a static Cover for the DiscussionService; see that interface for usage details". Is it a facade? Will we ever know?

  Posted by: steez on September 11, 2004 at 08:01 AM

• OpenUSS and FSL: Open Source LMS & LCS
  A J2EE and J2SE component-based and Open Source LMS and LCS is already available:

  OpenUSS and FSL:
  http://openuss.sourceforge.net
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/openuss

  OpenUSS User Community:
  http://openuss.sourceforge.net/openuss/user/user.html
  There are a lot of articles from the community page.

  Reference installation
  http://www.openuss.org

  Release Information 1.4:
  http://www.javalobby.org/thread.jspa?forumID=17&threadID=12803

  OpenUSS Perspective Screenshot:
  http://www.javalobby.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/61-12578-91798136-672/openuss.jpg

  FSL Perspective Screenshot:
  http://www.javalobby.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/61-12578-91798136-671/fsl.jpg

  We are adding MDA on the top. For the infrastructure we use EJOSA (http://ejosa.sourceforge.net). We adding more perspectives like consultancy with video conferencing, etc...

  Cheers,
  Lofi.

  Posted by: dewanto on September 14, 2004 at 01:12 AM

• OpenUSS and FSL: Open Source LMS & LCS
  ...
  to make it KISS, OpenUSS and FSL use the same concept as Eclipse, the so called:
  "Multi-Perspectives Concept":

  In OpenUSS you will find an enrollment of lecture with many
  perspectives (lecture materials, discussion, mailinglist, quiz, consultancy, etc.).

  In FSL you will also find a learning unit with many perspectives
  (intro, text study, online, etc.).

  All these perspectives are easy to extend or you can build your own perspectives easily thanks to the component architecture of OpenUSS and FSL.

  Cheers,
  Lofi.

  Posted by: dewanto on September 14, 2004 at 01:21 AM

• OpenUSS and FSL: Open Source LMS & LCS
  ...
  Sorry to add more info :-)

  At the moment we are adding MDA (Model Driven Architecture) on the top, to make the development of perspectives more KISS. We believe that all the pedagogical concepts should be easy to implement (a concept without implementation is not that useful), therefore all the implementors should only work on the models. MDA is the best concept for this purpose, IMO.

  OpenUSS at IMS Project article:
  http://www.imsglobal.org/af/afv1p0/imsafwhitepaperv1p0.html

  OpenUSS and FSL at NetBeans.org:
  http://edu.netbeans.org/support/oss.html

  Cheers,
  Lofi.

  Posted by: dewanto on September 14, 2004 at 01:29 AM

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