PHP O.K.I. Community Summit
Middlebury College is pleased to host the PHP O.K.I. Summit to be held in Middlebury VT, USA on September 26-27. Whether you are an educational technologist looking to integrate PHP-based applications into your educational enterprise or a software developer wishing to learn more about Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs) for PHP application interoperability you are welcome to join us. For more information see: PHP O.K.I. Community Summit Site
What are the OSIDs?
"The Open Knowledge Initiative has produced a series of Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs) informed by a broad architectural view of the educational technology landscape. As learning management systems have become a core component of the campus information technology infrastructure, O.K.I. seeks to simplify and enhance the creation of educational applications.
"The OSIDs are an abstraction layer between the programmer and the enterprise infrastructure systems of his or her campus. Each OSID is characterized by a tightly defined set of methods and strict boundaries. This approach offers a number of important benefits to applications designed to the OSIDs:
- Simple integration with existing infrastructure
- Local innovations can be shared across campuses or universities
- Adaptation to new technology without destabilizing the overall environment
The OSIDs in PHP
While most of the original development of the OSIDs was done with Java in mind, the architectural decisions in the OSIDs are language and platform agnostic. What we have done is taken the abstracted description of the OSIDs written by the O.K.I. developers and converted it into PHP class definitions.
For the most part, these PHP class definitions look just like the Java version of the OSIDs, albeit with PHP syntax. An exception to this similarity is the use of optional parameters in the PHP methods instead of the use of method overloading in Java. From a usage standpoint however, the PHP and Java versions are identical.
Using the OSIDs in PHP
There are several ways that the OSIDs can be used to aid educational systems development and implementation. Among them are the following:
- The OSIDs can be the "public interface" of an application framework, as done in the Harmoni project.
- Institution-specific implementations of the OSIDs can be accessed to provide a given service, such as Authentication, for a variety of applications.
- An application can provide access to its functionality and data via its own implementation of the OSIDs.
Due to the central nature of the functionality described by the OSIDs, a given institution may have many applications providing the services as well as many applications consuming them, with others doing both. PHP's ability to instantiate Java classes can allow PHP applications that consume O.K.I. services to make calls to Java implementations of the services as well as native PHP implementations.
PHP Implementations of the OSIDs
The Harmoni application framework includes a set of implementations of the OSIDs that rely on various features of the Harmoni framework for things such as database access. These implementations also often rely on each other, as in the case of the Repository implementation making use of the Hierarchy implementation. Provided a properly configured Harmoni installation, these implementations should be accessible by non-Harmoni applications.
If you have developed stand-alone PHP implementations of any OSIDs or have developed any PHP implementations as part of an application, let us know!
download
Access the PHP specification of the Open Service Interface Definitions through the Harmoni Project on SourceForge »
Access the OSID documentation and Java specification for the Open Service Interface Definitions from the O.K.I. Project on SourceForge »
products & projects
The Harmoni Application Framework provides structure and services for the rapid development of PHP applications, specifically curricular systems.
Harmoni provides implementations of the OSIDs which client applications can use to access Repository, Authentication, Authorization, Id Management, and Course Management services. more»
The Segue Collaborative Learning System (CLS) has been in use at Middlebury College and elsewhere since July, 2003.
The next version of Segue, currently in development, is built atop the Harmoni application framework and uses the OSIDs internally for Repository, Authentication, Authorization, Id Management, and Course Management. more»
affiliates
Middlebury College provides the hosting of this site. It also funds the development of Segue and Harmoni through its Educational Technology group.
The National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) was established in September, 2001, through a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to serve as a catalyst for innovation and collaboration for national liberal arts colleges as they seek to make effective use of technology. NITLE provides partial funding for Segue development and dissemination.
Special thanks to the Open Knowledge Initiative for their exceptional work as well as their web design.