Martin Dougiamas

Hi there David B,

Ankit, Andrew and David M have all made some good replies but I'll reiterate:

The purpose of improving the logging/events to this level was mainly for two reasons:

1) We want to improve the quantity and quality of our "time-dependent" information (there are other APIs for accessing the databases).  This will help drive Moodle research into online learning, which in turn will enable us to create the best analytics tools (better than anything else out there) which will in turn support teaching and learning processes.  When I talk about analytics I mean AI, not pretty reports about "clicks" and paths.  Moodle will act as your assistant - contacting you proactively and supporting you.  All this work is coming up, and I hope to see the community developing a lot of plugins for it.  We've started one simple one already for 2.8:  https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Event_Monitor_specification

2) For larger sites, this torrent of logging (and real-time analytics) into internal tables would affect performance greatly, especially on clusters, so this new logging system has a way to stream that data into faster external databases, such as NoSQL ones.  This is pluggable so you can make your own interfaces to anything you like, even TinCan.

I appreciate all this has made logging more work for developers but there are longer-term considerations here that I don't think you may have grasped (probably because it's not been communicated well enough).

Further to this, Atto is better integrated with Moodle APIs at all levels.  It's not just about which JS library it's using.

Anyway I think Atto could migrate to JQuery fairly easily if it has to.

And the reason I'm saying jQuery is because it's the framework that any dev who comes to Moodle seems to already know ... for me this popularity outweighs nearly all the technical arguments.  But let's see.

Most humans couldn't either.  That question assumes you speak English AND know what a steeplechase is.

The Gradebook working group is not a developer meeting.  It was a user meeting to brainstorm and collate features.  These are documented in MDL-44673 (specs are still being improved).

For those worried about the larger changes I can reassure people that:

• they are much better thought-out than the docs show in their current state
• the bigger ones will be put up as prototypes on the prototype site for further feedback before they get into core.  It is very hard to really understand them without the prototypes, and so I think some of the discussion now is not helpful for anyone.