First PHP O.K.I. Summit
From Harmoni
The first PHP O.K.I. Summit was held September 26-27th 2007, at Middlebury College, in Middlebury Vermont.
See the Summit info page for some more details about the event.
Contents |
Presentations
The first day of the summit was a series of presentations about the current state and future plans of development projects that are going on using the OSIDs in PHP.
Jeff Merriman (O.K.I./MIT)
Overview of O.K.I. and the architectural way of thinking when designing complex systems.
Adam Franco (Middlebury College)
Harmoni framework and discussion of techniques for building with the OSIDs. afranco@middlebury.edu
Alex Chapin (Middlebury College)
Demo of Segue and Concerto systems (build on Harmoni and the OSIDs)
Marc Alier (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya)
Description of the CAMPUS project and its OSID/Moodle/Sakai architecture.
Contact: malier@lsi.upc.edu home page blog
Also attending from UPC/UOC were Francesc Santanach Delisau and Jordi Piguillem.
Stuart Sim (Moodle Rooms)
A discussion of how Moodle Rooms factors their hosted Moodle installations to enable them to support thousands of instances of Moodle and millions of users. Also a discussion of how the OSIDs fit into this system to enable easy plug-in of additional capabilities for student information management and repository access.
Terry Zimmerman (Apple)
Demonstration of the Apple Learning Interchange and discussion of how the OSIDs may be useful for that program.
Yusuf Bhabhrawala (UCLA)
A demonstration of a system for displaying and browsing geographically and temporally located information, imagery, and maps overlaid on Google Maps base-layers. yusufnb@humanities.ucla.edu
Working Sessions
On day two of the summit we sat down to discuss a variety of topics. Surrounding the usage of the OSIDs and where work needs to be done.
OSID v3
The new version of the OSIDs, currently in draft form. We discussed the following topics and action-items.
Overview of OSID v3 By Tom Coppeto
OSID v3 Interface Relationships
XOSIDs for generating OSID language bindings
Project: V3 Proxy-Authentication/Repository Example
In order to get OSID v3 tested and ready for release, we decided that several working example implementations will need to be built. These example implementations will be a simple as possible, but will exercise the OSID-loader, configuration, and proxy-authentication steps. It is felt that these steps are somewhat complex and difficult to describe in documentation. Working examples will go a long way toward ensuring that implementers are clear on these initial processes.
This will be a very simple example provider and client will load and configure a repository and allow browsing assets in the repository.
- OsidLoader
- Authentication acquisition
- Repository Proxy Manager instantiation
We will use the following Asset-Type in this example:
asset::edu.middlebury::text
which will have support the following methods:
Asset->getText() AssetForm->setText($text); AssetQuery->matchText($text);
- The PHP example implementation will be done by Adam Franco at Middlebury.
- The Java example implementation will be done by Andrew McKinney at MIT.
OSID Bridging
The second major topic is the mechanism for enabling a provider in environment to be accessed by a client in another environment, even if the environments are across a network or in different programming languages. Some sort of XML-RPC method will be used internally in the bridging mechanism, with in-language implementations communicating with the end-client or end-provider on either side of the bridge.
Due to the inconsistencies of OSID v2 implementations, this work will be done using OSID v3.
- Using Repository Example above...
- Catalonia Cross-Network bridge to link example provider and client.
- Auto-generate bridge for other OSIDs from XOSIDs.
- MoodleRooms is working on a Repository v2 bridge.
OSID v3 to v2 Connection
At the time of this writing, there are several hundred Java OSID v2 Repository providers. These are an important resource with which both PHP and Java OSID v3 clients should be able to communicate. In order to ease the transition to OSID v3, a Java adapter will need to be built so that any OSID v3 client can talk to these OSID v2 Repositories.
- A Java v3 provider to v2 client adapter will built.
- The PHP-Java bridge can terminate at the above-mentioned adapter.
This will provide:
- Ability for Java OSID v3 clients to access Java OSID v2 Repositories.
- Ability for PHP OSID v3 clients to access Java OSID v2 Repositories.
- Ability for PHP OSID v3 clients to access Java OSID v3 Repositories.
Moodle/Sakai/OSID Launching
Discussion of dynamically configuring OSID implementations to support OSID-clients. These implementations will talk via an XML RPC gateway to a Moodle authoritative data store.
