Dev8D 2011 – day 1

Posted on by Tessa (the external)

For the second year I have attended Dev8D, the JISC funded developer conference.  An excellent opportunity to network with other developers in Higher Education and to learn about new technologies.

Below are some highlights of the sessions and talks I attended on day 1.

Blackboard

About

  • written in Java
  • had a stable API since 2001
  • many recent API and plugin development improvements
  • direct database querying is now licensed
  • entity relationship diagram is published
  • lots of existing plugins, including text/SMS services
  • plugin exposure can be targeted to specific users
  • supports plugins not written in alternative languages
  • uses SOAP but a Newcastle chap has created a REST API
  • CourseSites.com offers 5 free courses (supports subset of OpenID like providers)
  • granular security policies for web service API – down to the per function  level

General VLE tit bits

More VLEs are moving towards using *IMS common cartridges* providing greater interoperability

Look into further

  • LIS
  • SIS
  • OCELOT community
  • SCORM stands for Sharable Content Object Reference Model
  • IMS LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) standard uses SOAP

Lightening talks

See: http://data.dev8d.org/2011/programme/session-type.php?type=http://data.dev8d.org/2011/programme/dev8d_programme.rdf%23sessiontype-Lightning

Molly

  • feed aggregator
  • HE produced using a sustainable approach
  • Python/Django
  • Opensource
  • XML
  • JSON
  • HTML5
  • Format X – future formats
  • can still target handsets – smart/feature phone
  • very inclusive
  • long term support, University of Oxford has committed 2.5 FTE to project
See related application: MyMobile Bristol

www.dreamspark.com

  • Free Microsoft professional tools for students.
  • .NET

Naturelocator

The JISC funded “Nature Locator” project will help the researchers by creating mobile applications that provide geo-tagged photographs, and visualisation tools to facilitate crowd-sourced verification of the data submitted during 2011

Related technologies

  • Titanium – translates your hard won web skills into native applications that perform and look just like they were written in Objective-C [iPhone and iPad] or Java [Android].
  • PhoneGap – an opensource mobile phone framework using HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and Cloud deployment

All your bases belong to us: L10N & L18N @ Dev8D

Malte Ressin discusses his Phd research at Thames Valley University and the issues that affect internationalised and localised projects
  • pluralisation (2 kinds in Russian)
  • sort order (in Spanish ll is one letter not double l)
  • affects many areas: sales, UI design, legal, marketing, publisher, …
  • early research required to discover any cultural content guidelines
Contact Malte Ressin if interested in being part of his case studies

What makes Dexy so Sexy for creating beautiful code documentation?

Dexy is an open source document automation tool that can help you create documents using your favourite programming languages and your favourite software.
  • Output formats include: CSV, latex, PDF, and WordPress posts
  • Can incorporate testing output (cucumber or was that water??)
  • Can automate screen shots – part of implementation of the test
  • Python command line tool

Lucero

Linking University Content for Education and Research Online
http://lucero-project.info/lb/

Look up

Uses for RDFa to promote details for pricing info in Google

Archives Hub Data and APIs

  • union catalogue
  • could be institutional records, …
  • use EAD (Encoded Archival Description – XML)
  • provides searches/indexes of the archives
  • uses CQL (Contextual Query Language)

LOCAH

  • project using Linked Data
  • related to COPAC data

Look up related projects

DBpedia – a community effort to allow you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia

Molly 1

About

  • feed aggregator
  • Opensource
  • Python >= 2.6 < 3
  • Django 1.2
  • PostgreSQL but others DB could be used
  • mobile web vs native
  • could be just used as an aggregation service not for mobile web
  • produced by University of Oxford
  • nearing version 1.0
  • akin to Java based MyMobile Bristol application developed by ILRT, University of Bristol during the same period

Features

  • Geodata including Open Street Map
  • nearest real time bus info (Oxford specific)
  • contacts via LDAP
  • library search
  • maps – well targeted for feature (non smart) phones
  • podcasts
  • feedback/voting
  • url shortener
  • QR codes (3D barcodes)
  • oAuth
  • batch processing
  • easy to override blocks of templates and media
  • easy to plug in different data providers
  • installer will ask most setting questions
University of Oxford runs on Ubutntu 10.04 LTS VMWare ESXi, 2GB RAM
Also learnt: oAuth supports disabling device access from source application.  Useful if a device is lost.