Technology Used
What technologies and/or e-tools were available to you or did you seek to develop?
Wherever possible the project adopted open standards and open source software.
Technical development included:
- Apache Webserver and Tomcat to provide necessary web services
- MySQL was used for both the portal and e-portfolio database
- uPortal provided the portal framework and PETAL was used for the ePortfolio system
- LOM IMS2 standards were used for learning objects
- XML documents were used to create metadata-rich files
- Only basic authentication and authorisation were achieved, though we investigated systems using LDAP and Shibboleth protocols
- KUSP Project to provide a Shibbolized portal (http://www.kent.ac.uk/is/kusp/)
Interoperability explored the extent to which the portlets from partner institutions can be linked through the portal.
- Web-based static resources were designed for portability. The use of templates was explored to test the portability of resources between institutions or into a central resource
- Web-based interactive resources should be designed in a way that enables them to be used as learning objects capable of being used within a variety of web applications such as VLEs
- The PDP system in the pilot would provide output from the e-portfolio SQL database in a form that could be imported by other institutional (PDP) systems, using emerging interoperability standards (e.g. IMS, XML)
