Comments on: LMOS Services and Service Brokers, Part I

By: Greetings from the Sakai Conference at e-Literate

Greetings from the Sakai Conference at e-Literate — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 15:31:19 +0000

[...] Today I attended a couple of pre-conference working groups. One of the most exciting conversations of the day was about cross-tool interoperability. What the group actually ended up talking about was an idea very similar to the “LMOS service broker” idea that Patrick Masson, Bernie Durfee and I advocated while we were at SUNY and that I blogged about here (parts I and II). You can read those posts to get a fuller idea of what this is all about but, in brief, the basic concept is that any tool should be able to say to some sort of service registry or bus, “Hey, I have an assignment here; does anybody out there have anything they can do with an assignment?” Other tools might respond by saying, “Yeah, I can grade an assignment,” or “Yeah, I can store an assignment in the person’s ePortfolio”, or any one of a hundred other things. Links to those services are dynamically generated into some sort of in-page component, e.g., a drop-down menu. The user could then apply those services without leaving the page, and this would all be provided essentially without the tool developer having to know in advance what services will be available. (At Oracle, the phrase I keep hearing for these sorts of drop-in services is “contextual actions.”) I’m really high on this potential development for a lot of reasons; maybe when I get home and recharge a little I’ll find time to write a more detailed post. [...]

By: LMOS Services and Service Brokers

LMOS Services and Service Brokers — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:07:36 +0000

One of the most important concepts in the LMOS Project Vision and Mission Statements is the service broker. In fact, it may very well be the most important concept. But it can be a little abstract, especially for non-technologists (like…

By: Michael Feldstein

Michael Feldstein — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 16:57:10 +0000

Thanks, Beth. I hope to have one or two more posts up soon that add some more detail.

The degree to which this notion of a service broker relates to what are commonly referred to as “web services” or a “service-oriented architecture” (SOA) is really beyond my level of expertise to address. Patrick Masson and Bernie Durfee (who, as you know, are colleagues from SLN’s technology team) have both expressed concerns that SOA with the number of services we are talking about could get…messy. This is not to say that web services wouldn’t be part of the ultimate solution–I think they’d almost have to be. But the details of when to use a web service versus when to use programming language-specific are nuances that are frankly beyond my grasp at the moment.

By: beth harris

beth harris — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 06:46:40 +0000

Thanks Michael, this helped - although there are many things that are still (of course)quite murky to me (ugh, I used to be an art historian, and sometimes I wish I still was). You are writing about services provided by the operating system that are independent of the application being run — and that seems to be the focus of the ideal learning management system you are describing (seamlessly interoperable, and where the programming is not a burden). I am wondering about the relationship of what you are discussing to web services?

for example, I found this interesting:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=smm_sn_aws/104-0350131-3700750?%5Fencoding=UTF8&node=3435361