Wednesday, November 25, 2009

New Technology @ OSDC

I have been attending the Australian Open Source Developers Conference run by the Australian Open Source Developers Club over the last couple of days. Very interesting conference which never fails to stimulate the mind and open up new possibilities with emerging and existing technology.

I had my TUG and OSVR cap firmly on my head for this conference and have come across some technology that lends itself to the cause and possibly may even allow TUG and OSVR to get to our goals quicker.

The first main stand out technology I have been introduced to so far is the Microsoft Cloud Computing platform called Azure (www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/). Azure is a windows based virtual hosting platform which allows us to run windows software (in our case hopefully the opensim server) on a platform that easily scalable! Potential for this is quite massive and Microsoft have really moved into the cloud computing market with this product. I have been told I will get some free tokens to use the Azure platform from the Mircosoft representative here at OSDC :) We will see where this takes OSVR!

The second bit of cool technology is based around a Business Rules engine written in Java called Drools. The presenter demonstrated creating a simple HTML interactive Questionnaire UI using AJAX calls to a web service which in turn employed the Drools rules engine to organise the presentation of data (in this case questions and answers). This small example could prove to be a good place to start investigating how we could adapt a rules engine model to control the business rules for the TUG engine (well in TUG's case to control the flow of a training course or Question and Answers sessions). We would need to find an equivalent for our programming language (Java is not really our style :P) or perhaps do a port to our preferred language.

Anyway I am off to hear about more interesting things that may or may not be useful for OSVR or TUG.

Geoff T