2006-03-17 Manchester
Web Services Demonstrator out on developer release
At lunchtime on Friday, March 10, 2006, XCRI announced to limited group of developers the release of a demonstration web service. Paul Walk, Senior Web Services Developer at London Metropolitan Unversity, had produced a suite of servlets to demonstrate administration, upload and query services for XCRI documents. Within a couple of hours, XCRI's query service end point had been consumed by the Personal Learning Environment Reference Model demonstrator (Plex)!
Built on Berkeley XML DB from SleepyCat, the XCRI webservice demonstrator supports interaction for users and administrators:
- Users have access to:
- Pre-defined XQueries for which they can supply querystring parameters and receive XCRI XML fragments in response
- A REST query service that allows XPath queries to be specified directly in the URL. Each returns XCRI XML fragments.
The links below open in a new window and are best viewed in Firefox as some of the XML returned appears to trip up IE.- Show me every learning outcome in the sample collection...
http://portal.londonmet.ac.uk/xcri/curriculum/spec/learningOutcomes/learningOutcome -
How about the assessment strategies for the standard accounting modules...
http://portal.londonmet.ac.uk/xcri/curriculum/spec[dc:type='STAN']/strategy[identifier='assessment']/description -
What does a complete module spec look like...
http://portal.londonmet.ac.uk/xcri/curriculum/spec[identifier='AC2001C/N'] -
OK, go on then show me everything so I can dust off my XPath and have a play...
http://portal.londonmet.ac.uk/xcri/curriculum/spec
- Show me every learning outcome in the sample collection...
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Administrators can:
- Create and manage collections of XCRI documents
- Import XCRI documents into a collection that have been uploaded to the server using WebDAV
- Build and manage XQueries for users to run
A zipped distribution is available for download.
XCRI Web Services Demonstrator Documentation Wiki
Paul Walk is producing full documentation for the XCRI demonstrator, including JavaDoc and UML diagrams, on a Tiddly Wiki site at: http://portal.londonmet.ac.uk/xcriDocs/docs/
A zipped distribution is available for download.
XCRI Programme Specification XSL Transform
Manchester Metropolitan University is currently reviewing the information gathered in Programme Specification documents as part of a move towards a work-flow-driven, on-line curriculum management and quality assurance process. A UML diagram of the information identified in early meetings as important for satisfying quality and marketing requirements is shown below:
To focus discussion about information required for the Programme Specification, it was decided that a prototype should be built for an existing course. As I had an example of valid XCRI XML for part of an MMU programme, I decided that it would be great opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: produce a prototype Programme Specification for the next meeting of the working group at MMU, and produce a sample XSLT for creating an XHTML Programme Specification document for XCRI XML.
