XCLAMS: Federated Servers

Last modified by Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) on 2022/02/25 09:25

Mentor(s)
Estimated workload

several weeks

Details

The XWiki Collaborative Learning Assets Management System is used in several projects of sharing platforms for learning content, among others: curriki.org, i2geo.net, and planete.sankore.org.

The project's work is to implement web-based tools in these platforms so that content in one platform can be made visible in another. Differently than federated search, the objective is to allow an easy transport of a resource from one server to another where it starts a new life while it keeps a link to the original. In open-source parlance, this gives birth to a fork. That transport should be initiated by a function triggered by a user who thinks it is useful to copy to bring the resource closer to him/her or a group where he/she is a member.

Ideally, the tool should scale to support administrators that transport complete collections (as much as 1000) of selected learning resources.
Moreover, the link to the original should be kept and displayed and it should be possible for a user to request an upgrade of the transported resource if the source has been updated and if compatible. The practice of versionning systems such as git or mercurial should be a model. The project would be very successful if it can employ the 3-way-merge facilities of the underlying XWiki to this process, making it possible to work in parallel.

Such a contribution is likely to support such initiatives as the build of a local copy of Curriki with selected content which can serve a local community of teachers (the Curriki team has been asked for such by governments of countries with a relatively limited external internet bandwidth such as pacific islands). Moreover, this contribution should be created in a sufficiently generic way so that any XWiki installation that has the necessary XWiki objects to transport the learning resources can exploit it.

Mentors: the XCLAMS community, including Paul Libbrecht and Bob Greenawalt (confirmed), as well as Joshua Marks, Ludovic Dubost and Flavius Olaru.

Discussion: is to happen on the XCLAMS and xwiki-devs mailing-lists as well as on the #xclams and #xwiki IRC channels. We welcome students' questions there!

Delivery: open-source code (LGPL) using Groovy, and Velocity that can be made part of the XCLAMS core code. Possibly Java code too.

Developer profile
  • experience with web-services (REST-like approaches, transporting JSON, XML, HTML)
  • HTML, JavaScript, ideally ExtJS.
  • Java, ideally groovy, velocity
  • ready to get to grips with the XWiki object model
Active
Yes
Year

2014

Status

Proposed

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