Alex Little

Was at the JISC Joint Programmes meeting the past couple of days, with the other projects in the eLearning Frameworks program and giving an update as to how far we’ve come.

This week, I’ve mainly been looking at how to interface the player with the environment tools. I’m still not totally sure of the best way to go about it. I’ve got a couple of options (I think!), each of which have their own +ves and -ves:

• use the OKI OSID method. This could be the best way to go, though I think that it may be a bit too heavyweight for what we actually need. Although I’ve been on an OKI workshop, I’m not sure I understand it sufficiently well to write the interfaces required.
• The other option is it just to directly write a .jar file which the player can connect to. This can then use web services to connect to the various tools and act as the interface between the player and the environment. The good thing about this is that I already know what I need to do and so should be relatively straightforward for me to implement. The downside to this method is that to change any of the tools used could require some changes to the code. However it would only be the .jar that needed updating rather than the whole player code.