One of the interests of the Booth online educational technology group at Leeds is the evolution of the VLE from dumb monolith to a smart, pluggable, Service-Oriented VLE (SOVLE).
When the time came to leave behind the pretty Visio diagrams and actually do some construction work, one of the first needs to be addressed was some sort of content repository. Alfresco had been on our radar for a while. It is an Open Source (OS), Java enterprise content management system with over a million downloads from SourceForge and a large, busy developer community. Alfresco has been deployed by many large companies and organisations and has demonstrated its utility and scalability.
One of the drivers behind the design of our SOVLE is to maximise the scope for teaching and learning workflow and for information flow both between constitutent services and between the SOVLE and a user's Personal Learning Environment (PLE). Alfresco is superlative in this respect. There is a front end Web application. It has a JavaScript API that operates on repository objects. There is a Web scripting container that enables the use of JavaScript and FreeMarker to create RESTian services. It has a set of SOAP/HTTP Web services for repository management. Remote access is possible using Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI). It is possible to map a local drive to the repository so that objects can be accessed like a local file system. Alfresco also has an embedded JBoss jBPM process engine for enterprise workflow. The latest release contains an implementation of the draft Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification whose aim is to ensure interoperability between different content management systems. Alfresco is also compliant with JCR 170, the Content Repository for Java API.
Alfresco implements the Microsoft SharePoint API.
Alfresco uses the Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) which can provide multiple authentication methods so that alternative Shibboleth, OpenID and OAuth security processes might be accommodated.
In addition to all this, the user interface can be customised using FreeMarker templates. Alfresco also has a Flex Software Development Kit (SDK) for the creation of rich user interfaces.
Alfresco offers great potential in the bespoke VLE and PLE arenas and it is this potential that AMSeT sets out to investigate.
