Friday 21 April 06
Had good couple of days up in Bolton with Scott and at the ELF developers forum. We spent one day going through how to get the Enterprise SDK running, and although it’s not yet completely working I do feel i understand a lot more about it, and we’ve got some sample code which interacts with a database now.
The reason we couldn’t get it actually running was a problem between the different versions of Axis. The cetis-ws-client was built using Axis 1.1, and I’ve been using Axis 1.2, differences in the ‘constants’ package stop them being compatible with each other. So I thought I would try to switch to v1.1, but it I try to run with this I get errors when trying to start up tomcat (5.5), not sure why this is. So the plan is to update the client code so it can use Axis 1.2 instead – hopefully it’s not too much to change 
There are some other things for us to decide on too, mainly what to do about getting Moodle connected up to the Enterprise service and we’ve got a couple of options…
1) Build a PHP client for the Enterprise Service. With this option we’re really not sure how big a job this would be, it could be anything from couple of weeks to couple of months or more.
2) Build a client module which then provides a simpler interface for Moodle to connect to. This could be a ‘proper’ web service, or a rest type service.
My feeling is that we go for creating a rest client module for Moodle to connect to , as this ought to be the simplest to create. We need something simple and easy to do, as doing all this Enterprise stuff isn’t meant to be the focus of our project, and we’re in danger of spending all our time getting Enterprise Services working, rather than doing the grouping service!!
