Technology Used

What technologies and/or e-tools were available to you or did you seek to develop?

Given the range of functionality envisaged and a limited budget, proprietary commercially available technological solutions did not seem viable. For interoperability reasons, flexibility and cost the choices were seen to be in open source tools of the kind supported through the JISC.

The system was envisaged as being based on Java technologies, utilising web services and SOAP for transport, xml data formats, and deployed in a distributed architecture. The locally developed and widely known PDP system LUSID was identified as the means for adding this service to the learner interface. The Shibboleth approach was a candidate for authentication and authorisation issues. At the outset it seemed likely that the technical expertise needed to implement such a system was available in the academic and support departments of the large number of partners.

After Phosphorix Ltd were engaged to adapt the ioNode approach to the needs of the project, the tasks revolved around design decisions in discussion with Phosphorix staff. The ioNode approach is based on common open-source software including FreeBSD, Apache, Tomcat and all additional software developed to support the project is also available on an open source licence.

The design of the system was such that it could be made to work through manual intervention, but had the potential for later full interoperability. This decision was taken to minimize the risk to the project.

The scale and complexity of the tasks became obvious during the planning, and there was a careful balance to be made to bring this phase to completion within budget.

When the systems were functioning and had met testing standards in "lab" settings, training was arranged for the project staff who would be involved in using the systems. The training session revealed problems only apparent in multi-user situations, and significant changes had to be made.