knase / moomie - messaging middleware to support active elearning, a proposal
30-June-2005
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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.
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