knase / moomie - messaging middleware to support active elearning, a proposal
30-June-2005
permalink email this-
Printable pdf version of my talk
[ Download ]
(talk-on-new-middleware.pdf
-
159.23 Kb
)
Preview
- Flickr slideshow
A little over a year ago, I proposed some work towards a middleware and services architecture which we provisionally called moomie and knase. This was meant to be part of a collaboration within the e-compete european project, which recently ended, but for various reasons the practical collaboration never really took off.
This was very disappointing, since the proposed work was - I still think - very good, and potentially quite important. It's about time we at least documented the outlines of that proposed work, and that is what this weblog entry is for. I've made a Flickr slideshow from my presentation to the ecompete partners, and also attach a printable pdf version:
In a nutshell, moomie is a proposed layer to broker object-to-object messaging in a lightweight, easy to implement way, and knase is a proposed set of APIs for requesting and delivering services and tools to complement moomie-aware applications. We intended to do initial experiments towards moomie object messaging in FlashCOM technologies, applying lessons learned there to other web-application clientside platforms such as JAVA and browser-based javascript/DOM. A major initial application of moomie was to have been multiple-instance and multiple-view support for simulations. We planned to experiment with two Knase services: an event-aware graphical chat tool and a 'knowledge-snippet' repository.
Neither moomie nor knase was a completely new idea; for instance in the early days of the IMS Project, middleware for multi-user JAVA applets was seriously proposed. What we considered new were the advances in other new technologies, such as the flashCOM server and standards-savvy web browsers, which might provide a way to creating limited middleware support for more interactive elearning activities in an extremely lightweight and incremental manner. Since we made our proposal, service-oriented architectures for elearning have become quite a buzz, and lightweight standards have also started to gain awareness and credibility. Similarly, there has been a growing understanding of the need for more engaging and interactive web-based learning activities. I have a hunch that the moomie / knase proposal would be very timely if we had the time to make it. :o)
The presentation (see links above) explains our motivation, rationale and planned approach in more detail than I can provide in this weblog entry; please refer to it for more information.
I will try to get back to this issue soon, and write a more substantial explanation of the proposal here sometime in July. We've been very busy over the past year working on knotes and other enhancements to Plone; now that we've made some real progress on those fronts I would dearly love to kick off some practical work on the middleware and services we proposed last year.
Linking and trackbacks
When linking to this weblog entry, please use the 'permalink', which is http://www.knownet.com/writing/elearning2.0/entries/0575298368
