[Eclass-devel] my future involvment in eclass

[Stefano G. <st...@ga...>]

Hi everybody (there must be at least another one!), I'm using the list 
this time instead of the personal mail in case somebody else pops out... 
it may always be, right? Ok, just joking - "Hello, Kevin"  :)

I talked to the university today and I've got bad news: their project 
has been delayed until (at least) september 2004. They hope (against 
hope) to find some more money to make something significant instead of a 
sad, useless demo (hey but I'm good developing _those_ ... agh).

Seriously, there's also a very good piece of news: another client (the 
ministry of culture, you'd say "department" in the US I guess) is very 
interested in making some electronic courses available; these would be 
web-based and not on CD. So, it looks like I'm going to have the time to 
really delve in the system. Right now I'm going to work on three main 
areas (besides trying to figure out how the system works, of course):

1) modelling. I need a more refined/powerful course model than a simple 
string of eClass pages. Of course I don't know anything (yet) about the 
IMS specification and I don't know how easy it'll be to "drop" new types 
in eClass according to a hierarchical type organization. I suppose it'll 
be very easy if not trivial. I know there are templates, but do they 
allow the encapsulation of old types (templates) within them? I bet they do!

2) this is both for building and deploying: Zope integration. The final 
product has to support at least user login/authentication and the saving 
of the user's state. Something like: last page visited, "lessons" taken, 
quizzes done etc. It will also have to support different access to 
different parts of the course, e.g. "you can take this quiz only two 
times" versus "you can re-read the old lessons as many times as you 
want". Something like that.
It seems to me, at this point, that porting everything to Zope would be 
the Right Way (tm): of course such a course would need Zope support at 
the provider, a minor annoyance, but I know there are many ways to 
"dump" a Zope site to static HTML (using wget or a python script), so 
this would be a solution for those who want to generate simple HTML. Not 
to mention, Zope can be burned and auto-run from CD as well.
Of course this would dispose of the current eClass-builder, but only 
really with its current interface: the structure would be ported in Zope 
and its main functionality would be as well. Kevin could not like it, 
though, given the effort he put in it, and considering that I still have 
to demonstrate that Zope would be a friendlier editing environment 
(although i believe it would).

3) this is petty: I need something pretty - much prettier that the 
current ebuilder output. I know it's not the most important thing, but 
for my client it will probably be - i.e., I can already picture them 
seeing the grayish "default" site and going something like "ugh, we 
spent all our money on this" (of course, the quality of the framework 
would count nothing....). So, this is another thing I'd like to 
investigate/develop: a system to "prettify" the final output via CSS/XSL 
or whatever. I admit, I never really got into this new web technology, 
it seems it's about time...

ok, that's it for now. Talk to you (every one of you) soon!
Goodbye, multitude!

ciao
S