Alex Little

Some more comments from Juliette regarding the IMS Enterprise specs…

"The first thing that is a bit confusing about IMS Enterprise is that there are actually two specs – IMS Enterprise (latest: version 1.1) and IMS Enterprise Services (latest: version 1.0). They both deal with the problems of how we communicate information about people, groups, who belongs to which groups and which groups belong to which other groups between systems. The IMS Enterprise spec essentially tells us how to write all this information in an XML document whereas the IMS Enterprise Services gives us a web services API with calls that let us do things like create people and groups, put things inside groups, update and delete things and get information about groups and people given their ids within the system. The two are independent but designed in a fairly compatible way so you could use them both with the same data in a fairly sensible way I think. I did notice a list of differences between the two in the IMS Enterprise Services spec though.

So the IMS Enterprise spec is good if you want to transfer all the information about your system somewhere but is a bit clumsy for making any changes to that data while the IMS Enterprise Services spec is good for manipulating the data but doesn’t give you any way of finding out what is actually out there to manipulate. The specs suggest that IMS Enterprise Services supersede IMS Enterprise, but it looks like in practice you’ll need IMS Enterprise to get both your systems in sync somehow unless there’s some magic solution to this that I haven’t spotted.

I also had a look at Dan Stowell’s IMS Enterprise module for Moodle (look under Dan Stowell’s posts on the moodle.org forums – the latest version seems to be 0.6). It appears to very helpfully take an XML file in IMS Enterprise format and puts that information into the Moodle database in a sensible way. It doesn’t provide any sort of web services client for IMS Enterprise Services, so if we need one it looks like we’ll have to write one ourselves.

I need to look a bit more closely at Scott Wilson’s IMS Enterprise SDK too. At first glance it consists of some libraries and documentation to make it easier to attach an IMS Enterprise Services web service to your software. You still need to write your own backend of to actually do something with the calls rather than return ‘unsupported’. I suspect that what we and the MINTED project need here is probably fairly similar. "