Subject:
LMS Plan & Other assorted issues.
From:
"John Yin" <johnyin@anabas.com>
Date:
Tue, 26 Jun 2001 18:35:37 -0700
To:
"Geoffrey Fox" <fox@anabas.com>
CC:
"Alex Ho" <alexho@anabas.com>

We spent the last 2 days finalizing the product and design for the LMS
system.  I've attached the powerpoint associated with that.

We focused more on the higher level API's exposed to the JSP's.

We have deferred on:
(1) Java query API for GXO design
(2) EJB Castor => XML DB research

because I think these would take a significant amount of research that we
don't have for a 3 week implementation.  For our intermediate answer to (1)
is that the high level API's would contain the necessary functionality to
abstract away the underlying query implementation & API.  For (2), in the
worst case, we can always do a manual mapping from XML => RDBMS for our
needs.

It might be better for Dr. Fox to get Ozgur to continue the work on the
above 2 items since we are trying to have a clear separation between FSU and
Anabas work.

So in all, we still currently have 3 legality issues:

(1) Audio recording/playback code
    My current approach is to use FSU libraries and show it as demo of what
is
    capable.  We will write our own playback sharedlet and launch the event
based
    version in this release.

    Next version will contain integrated audio.....we would have to write
our own
    HearMe audio => RealAudio converter.  So it would be nice if your
students can
    document the HearMe audio file format clearly.

(2) GXO
    This is a tricky issue.  In order to deliver the LMS system, we would
need the
    underlying implementation as we have already convereted all of our pages
and
    systems to use this as the foundation.

    What to do here is unknown and we should decide.

(3) RealAudio distribution
    We can not legally distribute RealAudio client as part of our product.
The
    current approach can be 2 ways:

	* Use windows media player which can be distributed after MS run a
background
        check on use (they may deny useage if they think we compete with
NetMeeting
        too much.

	  If we do this then we would have to write our a convereter to windows
media
	  player format.

      * Use RealAudio and just put it into the web UI that directs them to
the
	  RealAudio site and download/install the client (not as seemless but I
think
	  acceptable.

We should have a discussion to resolve these issues.  By the way, should I
be including Eduardo in these e-mails?

John Yin
VP Engineering
Anabas, Inc.
TEL: (408)441-8803
FAX: (408)441-8802