[sugar] offline moodle

[Martin Langhoff]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 4:01 AM, David Van Assche <dvanassche at gmail.com> wrote:
>    I'm currently working with OLE Nepal to find the best solution for
> synchronising online and offline course material via Moodle. There are
> currently 2 projects that do exactly this via different mechanisms, though
> currently they use what some might consider to be a heavy memory and cpu
> footprint by using the same mechanisms of a regular online moodle (namely a
> webserver, server side scripting and database (mysql or sqlite) )

Cool. This is somewhat of a re-post of an earlier message to
server-devel, IIRC. I'm glad you've done more research on the jolongo
track as I hadn't heard of it before.

> 1. Open University Moodfle on a stick

As you say, I have been involved on this track. The work OU is doing
is great, and it advances Moodle in various fronts that we care about.
The overall implementation of it is not a good long term bet for us.
It might be feasible short term but it will surely need a ton of work
to fly, including a port to sqlite and a threaded or forking webserver
in pure PHP.

In other words, if there's anyone interested in doing the heavy
lifting, I can provide a bit of mentoring on what needs to be tuned on
the PHP & Moodle side. It will need a wrapper similar to the
wikislices activity too.

> 2. Jolongo (meaning backpack in slang Latin American Spanish)

also a Spanish native speaker - but I didn't know Jolongo as a slang term :-)

> adobe AIR

That is possibly not redistributable by us :-(

Is there a good explanation anywhere of what techniques are being
used? My long term plans are to work on a disconnected operation based
on Google-Gears or something similar. XPycom is included with Browse
IIRC, but it's very hard to get traction ustream with an XO-only
technology, so GG is much more likely to be a long-term viable plan.

If the AIR-based code can be ported to GG, then it could be a viable track.

> version will be using sqlite, so that could even things out. Giving it a
> couple of months will allow us to see which one of these projects is the
> best adapted to usage by OLE and olpc.

For OLPC, I suspect AIR is a no-go due to licensing reasons. Gears, on
the other hand, is definitely possible.

cheers,




m
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 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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