Forum LAMS Newsletter: Newsletter 30, 4th June, 06

By: James Dalziel

[ Forward ]

First External Tool Development for LAMS V2

A major technical reason for the redevelopment of LAMS into Version 2 was to make it much easier for programmers to create new activity tools to be "plugged" into the LAMS sequencing framework. With V2, we expect to see an explosion of innovative activity tools created all around the world based on the LAMS V2 "Tools Contract".

I'm pleased to say that although we're still only at the alpha release stage, we're had the first V2 tool created by an external developer (ie, someone not on the core LAMS team at Macquarie). Alex Little from the UK's Open University has been working on a Forum tool for the past few weeks using the LAMS V2 Tools Contract.

The focus of Alex's work was not so much the Forum, but rather the process of developing an activity tool to match the Tools Contract. Alex has documented the experience (including his code) and posted it to the LAMS V2 Wiki at http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/lams/Tool+Creation+Experience

Alex's work shows it is possible to build the basics of a LAMS V2 tool over a period of a few weeks, and that even when you are not familiar with some of the technologies involved (eg, Hibernate, Spring), it doesn't take long to understand these if you have a few years of Java programming experience.

Even more important, Alex has identified ways we can make it easier for other tool developers in the future by providing more documentation and frameworks - we're already working on this.

So on behalf of the LAMS core team as well as all the tool developers that will come in the future - a very large thank you to Alex!

CABWEB LAMS discussion

It's been an active week at CABWEB discussing the educational use of LAMS. Robyn Philip and Frances Bell have led the discussion - to join, see http://www.cabweb.net/ (see instructions for First Time Users to self-register)

LAMS on a shared server

It is possible to run LAMS on a server shared with other systems. This has been of particular interest to Moodle administrators who want to install LAMS and Moodle together on the one machine. For a discussion of the technical issues involved in having LAMS on a shared server, see http://www.lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/technicalcommunity/forums/message-view?message%5fid=235457

Posted by James Dalziel