Forum .LRN Q&A: dotLRN 1.0 release planning

Posted by Don Baccus on 09/24/02 08:40 PM

Now that OpenACS 4.6 is nearly frozen and ready for testing, it's time
to start thinking about a first release of dotLRN.

Sloan has asked Janine Sisk to manage this release. Her first task
will be to put together a task list and after that a release schedule.
From where I sit I think there's a big advantage to having the same
person manage both the 4.6 and dotLRN 1.0 releases. Among other
things any questions can be directed to Janine whether or not you know
for sure if it relates strictly to OpenACS 4.6 or dotLRN 1.0.

I expect Janine will be posting here shortly. Thanks for taking this
on, Janine!

2: Response to dotLRN 1.0 release planning (response to 1)

Posted by Igor Drozdov on 09/27/02 01:21 PM

Sorry if this subject has been covered elswhere, but maybe someone can provide a consise answer: in MIT presentation, slide 2 it is said that "iCampus funding received (2002) to build modular version [of dotLRN] using .NET framework and web services". What does it mean for OpenACS? A new .NET version? Or branching into OpenDotLRN? Seems very much like the story of ACS forced migration to Java...

3: Response to dotLRN 1.0 release planning (response to 1)

Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on 09/27/02 03:06 PM

Igor,

please take a look at these two threads to get a feeling about the history of that statement (the first thread might even includes a concise answer to your question):

http://openacs.org/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0005qV
http://openacs.org/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0005o8

Also note that the technical advisory board of .LRN is made up of key OpenACS community members, so rest assured that .LRN is going to continue to be good for OpenACS and vice versa (I seriously doubt you will find any support for porting anything in that group).

View the iCampus funding as support for an independent research project at MIT (research is an important part of academic life). If Sloan eventually decides to go with a .NET based platform based on that experimentation do not expect it to be finished any time soon... and do not expect it to be called .LRN

Please keep in mind that everyone is very busy at the moment putting everything in place to get OpenACS 4.6 and dotLRN 1.0 out the door. Cleaning up the documentation and marketing information is on the todo list.

4: Response to dotLRN 1.0 release planning (response to 1)

Posted by Alfred Essa on 09/27/02 03:36 PM

Igor, the slide is incorrect and will be taken down today. Originally, we were seeking funding from iCampus to do a complete port of .LRN to .NET. Carl Blesius, Don Baccus, and others persuaded me that this was unwise. At the same time, while iCampus has given us funding (at least verbally), it's a relatively small amount and not nearly enough to undertake a port. So, the issue is moot.

Separate from dotLRN, we plan to undertake a research effort to understand better how we can modularize applications using web services. The key architecture here is web services (SOAP, XML), not .NET. This is in the context of other large projects at MIT such as DSpace, OpenCourseWare, and OpenKnowledgeInitiative (OKI). The iCampus project is actually closest to OKI, which consists mostly of Java bigots.

Whatever comes out of this effort will be fully opensource (GPL).

5: Response to dotLRN 1.0 release planning (response to 1)

Posted by Caroline Meeks on 09/27/02 04:40 PM

I appologize for the confusion. I have fixed the slides on the dotlrn.org website.

Igor, thanks for finding that out of date slide so quickly (less then 12 hours!), it would have been much worse if we had gone to Educause with it.

Right now the dotlrn.org site is a static site with no staging server, CMS or even CVS. All our changes go live immediately. I can see that I need to change that ASAP. I hope to get a dotlrn.org running on an dotLRN installation as soon as I get back from Educause.