Spotlight
Unleasing Developers to Advance Education with SOA
From rich internet applications and 3D virtual worlds, to social operating systems and beyond there is a common requirement that education applications typically demand...complex underpinnings. CommonNeed is changing web application development by providing the complex "plumbing" and core applications as a starting point and allowing developers to focus on delivering innovative applications and user experiences.
Education software development has become an increasingly complex endeavor. The times when a single education developer could write a whole learning management system are long gone. The constantly increasing amount of technology and assets that need to be put into such software just make it too complex. Today’s software packages for education (LMS, LCMS, SIS, SRM, etc.) include advanced systems for assessment, presentation, scheduling, and collaboration. This brings out the problem of time and money that are needed to produce an application from scratch.The game development industry has evolved to the point where you don’t have to start from scratch in order to develop a very complex game. They use game engines that incorporate the common functions required for today’s games such as physics, rendering, artificial intelligence, etc. By doing so they free the developer from having to develop these very complex components and allow them to focus on developing the next great game.
The reality is that technology is going to continue to rapidly evolve and if we build a system which integrates all of today’s technologies then it won’t be long before it is out of date. Present day solutions unfortunately made implementation decisions to use technologies that were simple for web development, but poor at other critical things. Things such as, flexibility, extensibility, scalability, and easily integrating with existing or future technologies. Common Need has chosen to take a different approach to the design of software for education. Our philosophy is that you cannot predict what the next application is going to look like or what people will deem useful so you need to develop software that has as it’s fundamental characteristic the ability to integrate external services or applications.
To address the issues of vendor lock-in, control, future proofing, TCO, choice, and extensibility CommonNeed has developed the plugjam® platform; a service-oriented integration framework which integrates a collection of various services that can be utilized to build an application. plugjam® gives a developer a firm foundation upon which to build innovative education applications while minimizing the up front costs. Different applications will utilize some or all of the available services. Our platform provides a top-down framework that encompasses all technical aspects of education application development: rendering, editing tools, assessment, collaboration, social networking, and so on. It is aimed at developers who want a complete, off-the-shelf solution so that they can focus on their innovative development (as you are free to extend it however you want) and content without having to reinvent the wheel in some area of technology that's already well-defined. The platform has a clear separation of presentation, control, and data model. It leverages open standards and application programming interfaces to provide a means to integrate new technologies we have yet to think of to insure the ability of the platform to evolve and not have to bolt on technologies versus truly integrating them. The services which make up the platform are better than the typical developer could do without spending a huge amount of time on developing them from scratch.
Find out more about how plugjam helps you deliver powerful and engaging learning experiences.
