Who is going to Blackboard World 2011?

Re: Canvas

by Michael Penney -
Number of replies: 1

They make a big point that PHP is the language of 2000s decade and Ruby is the language of this decade. Is that true?


I call FUDsmile They do say Facebook is from PHP and Twitter is from Rubysmile.  Ruby provides alot of built in shortcuts, but has issues with scalability. With all their millions I still get that "Twitter is over capacilty" message a few times a day - w/as I alsmost never see Facebook down or even slow (even back when they were no richer than Twitter is nowsmile). Wikipedia regularly serves over 60,000,000 unique visitors/day on a shoe string budget.

Anyway, Ruby doesn't make a good Rubric designer module,  to do that you need a team, time, and a budget, with an educator to say what and how it should work, a system architect and UI designer to create a mockup and specification, coder(s) to build it as close to the design spec as she/he can get in the number of hours they can afford, and a project manager to keep the whole thing on track.

The hard part is not choosing the "right" server side scripting language,  most of the front end 'oooohs', 'ahhs', drags, drops, shades and fades are fron AJAX toolkits like Dojo and jQuery that work happily with PHP, Python, Ruby, even asp.NETwink. The hard part is getting a good team together and keeping them funded and on track from start to completion. O and good coffee, keep it comingsmile.

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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Canvas

by Don Hinkelman -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

Thanks, Michael, this is very helpful. So you're saying the beautiful rubric design module in Canvas was *not* done in Ruby per se, but rather through an AJAX toolkit like Dojo or jQuery, which can be applied to PHP as well.  Did I summarize that right? That means I could duplicate the lovely curves, fades, shades, drags and drops right here in Moodle with the tools you mentioned.

Actually, as a project manager, I have built a rubric designer for Moodle 1.7 before, in the assessment section of the Project Module. However, the interface was so bad, I lost interest and moved on to other projects. I agree about the difficulties of funding and design, and have been successful in some cases even with extremely limited funding. Probably due to really good coffee. Watch for the Sharing Cart 2.1--now approaching its fourth year! Very popular but definitely needing some pro UI design advice.

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