Jun 19
Early this week I have set up a Moodle 2.0 beta server for wiki 2.0 testing.
http://potato.lsi.upc.edu/moodle20beta/
It still in development so not all features are implemented yet.
Any comment or feedback will be welcome.
Jun 10
Some months ago, Dr. Chuck Severance asked to my boss and me to help him to write an appendix to his new book titled Using Google App Engine.
 
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May 26
This post show you the few needed commands to create a new branch in your colaborative repository:
- Clone the repository you want to branch
cd repositorynamegit push origin origin:refs/heads/branchnamegit checkout --track -b branchname origin/branchname
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May 22
Some months ago I installed a git repository in our Mac server to manage all our projects, but now we are migrating to another machine (another Mac). I think that it has taken me more time to set up all system this time than the first one, I couldn’t remember how to do it.
It is not going to happen next time! So I’m writing this small manual to not forget any step becouse I have had several problems configuring gitosis, a tool that helps hosting git repositories in an easy and safe way.
This how-to is an adaptation of gitosis readme applied to Mac OS.
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May 19
Download git source code from project’s home page.
Unzip the tar file and open a Terminal app to type:
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install
Now, git version control system is fully working.
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May 18
This post describes step by step how to install Trac using MacOS X Leopard’s Apache and mod_python.
First of all, you must install mod_python. I have written a post in this blog explaning how. There are options like WSGI or FCGI modules, but I have chosen this one.
After this initial configuration, you must download and install Trac. You can do it by downloading this application from its home page but I’m going to choose the easiest way.
Mac OS X includes easy_install tool that lets us to automatically download, build, install python applications.
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May 14
I was wrong…. We have won!!
IMS Global Learning Consortium has awarded our implementation of Moodle Simple Learning Tools for Interoperability module in Best Interoperability Innovation category.
The are some other awarded spanish projects:
- Silver Award: Agrega - Search, Find, Participate - Federated access to content in Spain education community
- Best Learning Portal: MyUOC – Online Learning Environment
- Best National Content Exchange: Agrega - Search, Find, Participate - Federated access to content in Spain education community
You will find the full list of awarded projects here
Congratulations to all people that have had Learning Impact this year!
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May 11
IMS Learning Impact 2009 is holding at Barcelona this week.
I’m glad to announce that my Google Summer of Code project about developing a Simple LTI client for Moodle has been chosen as finalist for the Learning Impact Award 
I know I’m not going to win, but I’m very happy about the nomination becouse I have to take up again this project to hand in as my Master Thesis. This nomination is an extra motivation to continue working on it the next 5-6 month.
Here is the full list of finalists
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Apr 27
One of our active projects is to backport Moodle 2.0 webservices to Moodle 1.9.
Because of all the differences between Moodle 2.0 and Moodle 1.9 we will have to put into practice some tricks. The following image is a diagram of the designed achitecture:
We have added to Moodle 2.0 webservices architecture a couple of components to solve some problems.
Core Layer
Core Layer has nearly the same elements that Moodle 2.0 core layer, but these elements had not been evolved. There are methods that print success messages to the screen, database libraries print error messages too, etc. This is a big problem! We don’t want to re-program all these functions, it would be a waste of time.
External Layer
We will copy external layer from Moodle 2.0 to Moodle 1.9. We want to make easier the upgrade from Moodle 1.9 to Moodle 2.0, we have to publish the same functions with the same parameters. We will have to tune their implementation a little, some published functions only exist on Moodle 2.0 or have changed a little from the previous version.
Local External REST Server is a new component that will provide a REST webservice throught localhost. It will call external functions, serialize results and return them.
Connectors Layer
We will copy all connectors from Moodle 2.0 to Moodle 1.9 and develop a proxy to the local REST server. The External Proxy will define the same functions that Moodle 2.0 Connectors are calling to the External layer. The main idea is to change all requires/includes in connectors to invoke proxy’s methods. The proxy will call external functions via local webservice and return the result.
Why are we doing this odd and tricky things?
If Moodle 1.9 core prints something to the screen, it will break all webservices response. Using this architecture, the only message that will be broken will be the response of local webservice call. If the Proxy detects an error in the local call (it can unserialize the response), it would know how to proceed in every situation.
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Apr 27
Moodle.com is betting seriously on adapt Moodle to provide services to external applications.
The main objective is to publish all interesting core functions as web services, therefore, other applications will be able to retrieve calendar events, Virtual Campus management applications will be build easily, etc.
During last year, I’ve been working with Ludo and other students to design and develop a prototype of these webservices. During last MoodleMoot at Barcelona, Martin validated the idea and, after some modifications, we started the development. I’m developing some components and coordinating a development team here in Barcelona, Jérôme Mouneyrac is coordinating the whole project from Australia, Petr Skoda is working on security issues, and other many people is contributing to this project.
The image over these words is a diagram about the decided architecture.
We have designed a 3 layers architecture: Connectors layer, External layer and Core layer. I’m going to explain them a little right now:
Core Layer
Core layer consist of all the Moodle core libraries that contain interesting functions to publish: functions about users, courses, groups, calendar, etc.
This layer is being improved in Moodle 2.0 because many of these interesting functions were printing messages to the screen. Moodle had not an API, it had several useful functions that had been developed during last last years. Because of the need of the webservices we are doing a refactor of all these core libraries and it starts to look like an API. Moodle core does not print messages, it throws exceptions for errors and does not have void methods.
External Layer
External layer consist of several new files called external.php, placed all over Moodle directories. external.php files contain wrappers to the layer below.
These wrappers are responsible for checking capabilities and parameters, and call the correct core function(s).
Connectors Layer
Connectors Layer is consist of several connectors. This layer will have a REST connector, a SOAP connector, a XML-RPC connector and a AMF connector. This layer admits plugins so many connector could be build easy to intergrate other systems with Moodle using other protocols.
This layer will be only responsible of accepting http connections, creating sessions and act as a bridge with the external layer.
This post is only an overview of the whole architecture, I hope I’ll have some time to make a couple of posts about external and connector layers, the ones that will be new at Moodle 2.0 and the most interesting layers of webservices.
Interesting Links:
- http://potato.lsi.upc.edu/projects/moodlewebservices
- http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Web_services_API_-_Function_List
- http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-12886
- http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Core_Function_List
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