Saulo Vallory's Mind

LORIS is an acronym for a very long, yet explaining, software name: Learning Objects Repository Integration System. Obviously, Loris is a lot more cute and easy to pronounce. The aim of the project was to integrate different learning objects databases spread around universities of different countries. Beyond the paper, a prototype was developed with an interface allowing a user to search for papers in all the participating universities as a unified repository.

The challenge

The greater obstacle to achieve our goal was the differences between the databases. Both in the database scheme and the database type. The same article would be stored in a relational database using LOM scheme by one university and in a object-oriented database using SCORM scheme by another. To address this problem, a set of abstraction layers and wrappers were used. Fortunately, the article was accepted in the International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices in 2005.

Abstract
In web-based education there is an emphasis on reusing and sharing instructional content due to the complexity of the development process of high-quality learning materials. It leads to the learning objects orientation as well as to partnerships among institutions to promote sharing of these objects. In order to allow local autonomy and less local effort when participating of this global environment, we developed LORIS, an integration system of learning objects’ repositories. This system is based on the mediators and wrappers architecture, implemented through web-services. Our approach allows local autonomy and also an interoperable integrated view. LORIS is being adopted by PGL, an international partnership project for promoting web-based education.

You can read the full article at

http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/NWESP.2005.49

Cemp is a acronym for Centro de Empreendedorismo (Entrepreneurship Center). It’s a department at PUC-Rio University (Pontifícia Univesidade Católica at Rio de Janeiro). The department reached us asking for a system to help them manage some tasks in the course. Instead of developing yet another school manager software, we proposed an innovative solution: build the tools they needed around a community web site.

At that time we were trying to launch a new product on the market called NeoCommunity. The proposal was to deliver social networks for businesses. Beyond the traditional relationship tools any social network has, for each business, tools like project and team management were to be added according to the needs of the client. Cemp was the first project built on NeoCommunity and NeoBase, and is still in use.

Many advances were made on the NeoCommunity, but we came to see through time that it would fit better as a service than a product.

About the project

descolando! is a brazilian college student social network. But it’s not like Facebook or Myspace. The site focus is to make the academic life easier for the students. A number of tools where developed to accomplish this:

• Professors evaluation and recommendation
• Studying resources exchange
• Disciplines and classes groups
• Microblogging tool to reach colleagues
• And others…

This project was developed using the NeoBase framework I projected. It is a very large project and made the framework itself grow in maturity, both of design and code.

Roles on the project

• Design the database and the application
• Coordinate the team
• Implement key functionalities

Technology background

• PHP
• Apache HTTP Server
• Hardcore Javascript
• MySQL

Around 2003 I was introduced to Microsoft’s .Net framework. I was amazed by the way I could implement a web application dealing with the interface layer like I did for desktop applications. Back there I was working with php, and I like how practical php is. Then I thought: wouldn’t be great if such framework existed for php developers? The answer to this question is NeoBase.

NeoBase is a component-based PHP framework inspired on .Net architecture. NeoBase separates the HTML and CSS from the PHP code allowing the designers and programmers to work in parallel accelerating the development process. Following the web 2.0 fashion, it has a great javascript API to manipulate the components at client-side and all the client-server communication is automatically done via AJAX requests.

If you don’t know how .Net framework works, this micro presentation will allow you understand how it is different from traditional web development.

As a one man only effort, the framework is still under development. Yet, during my entrepreneurship journey I used the framework to develop projects like CEMP and descolando!. So, the concept is proven. Now, I’m working on a new version, coincidentally my university final project, which I’ll make open source Q3 2010. The current version is already open source and can be downloaded at sourceforge. You can check out the code and play with it, but I don’t recommend using in production.

After sometime developing the Neobase framework and trying to ease the process of learning how it works, I noticed how difficult it is to provide a really good documentation. Perhaps, this is why it is so difficult to find such thing in the majority of open source softwares. This though never stopped bugging me and I kept thinking: there needs to be an easier way to do that!

Despite the look I get from almost every software developer I asked about the matter, six months ago I started researching the process of software documentation. I’m specially interested in frameworks documentation, because documenting a software gets far more difficult when the software is a framework. My goal is to specify a platform which will, hopefully, make documenting software easy, or, at least, less painful. I named this platform SoftDoc.

I’m writing a paper about my findings, and how the proposed SoftDoc platform would address the documentation process issues. For now, there is only a draft (in portuguese). I will translate it and upload the english version as soon as possible.