Forum LAMS for Tech-Heads - General Forum: Mobile (Android based Smart Phone and Tablet) support

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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HI Atif,

There's already plenty of work on this regard.

The next upcoming version (2.4.1) already has a new learner interface completely in HTML5 + SVG graphics.

The new progress bar is completely compatible with iPads and Android devices. Here are a screenshots of the current interface:

Continuing our work to move out of Flash interfaces, we are now testing a new non-flash interface to create lessons within LAMS.

As you might recall, this is the Flash interface we currently use in LAMS 2.4:

So now we have completely replace this with an SVG/HTML interface for 2.4.1 that looks as follows:

Moreover, we are also moving the LAMS Monitoring interface to this as well. And here's the incipient work already running on Android tablet:

Summarising, in LAMS 2.4.1 we'll have all interfaces but Authoring running non-Flash alternatives so they can be used in pretty much any mobile/tablet device.

Thanks

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: Atif Rasheed

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Wonderful, great to hear that :)
This dev or beta version is available to community for testing purposes ? We can probably also try it out and contribute to your Test/QA process :)

Posted by Atif Rasheed

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Hi Atif,

I'll see if I can update our demo site to the latest 2.4.1 dev version over the weekend so you can use this site to test.

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: Atif Rasheed

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Thanks Ernie.
Please see if you can share the source code or pre-compiled package and we can also deploy it in our labs for internal testing.

Cheers,
Atif

Posted by Atif Rasheed

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Hi Atif,

LAMS is open source and all our latest code is available at any time.

See the Building LAMS 2.4.x page on how to build the latest from source.

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: Atif Rasheed

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Thanks for the quick start guide Ernie. I have built and deployed the new EAR but still I don't see auto detection thing working on Mobile. I am using Samsung Galaxy Note II and when I access my lams URL, I see same flash plug-in requirement on main portal and then missing plug notification on authoring interface. Mobile interface is accessible on a different URL or some configuration is required to make it work ?

There is a new tab "???index.planner???" though which tries to open some not found page; "pedagogicalPlanner.do".

Posted by Atif Rasheed

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Hi Atif,

Ah, ok. Yes... sorry, as this is still a dev version, we haven't quite tied things up as yet.

So to get the new all HTML+SVG Learner version, in the source code, in the lams_learning/web/ folder, copy the main.jsp to mainflash.jsp.

Recompile and that should do it.

As for the Monitor interface, you have the normal Monitor button, but if you press the drop-down menu, you'll see that there's another Monitor option at the very end. Click on that one and this will show you the new HMTL+SVG Monitor, see here:

As for the new tab, that shouldn't be there. That must have been a left over folder from CVS. Next time you check out the LAMS code, please use the following CVS command instead:

cvs -z3 -Q -d :pserver:anonymous@code.lamsfoundation.org:/usr/local/cvsroot co -P all

The -P option will ensure that empty folders aren't created.

Thanks and looking forward to hear your feedback

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: Atif Rasheed

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Thanks for correction Ernie. Apologies on not getting back to you earlier as I was went out of station over the week end.

I am checking out latest code but probably your code hosting is quite slow as it's taking a lot of time to checkout.
I have a virtual machine on Amazon Web Services(EC2)and last time it worked pretty fast but right now it's dead slow.

I will update you with my feedback as soon as I am done with it.

Posted by Atif Rasheed

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Hi Atif,

Yes, our cvs server in Sydney is not the fastest. But we aren't able to move it elsewhere anytime soon. However, once you check out the code, getting updates should be pretty straight forward, so you won't need to check the whole thing out again and again.

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: Atif Rasheed

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Hi Ernie, I followed your instructions but unfortunately it didn't worked out for me. I am still getting same plug-in error.

Please note that mainflash.jsp & mainnoflash.jsp already existed however, I still copied main.jsp as mainflash.jsp as you advised.

Posted by Atif Rasheed

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Hi Atif,

So are you saying that after overwriting main.jsp to mainflash.jsp, and recompiling LAMS, you are still getting the Flash plugin?

Maybe you should be removing the jboss-5.1/server/default/tmp and jboss-5.1/server/default/work directories and restart jboss. Can you try that?

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Hi Atif,

Let me be a bit more specific on the things you would need to change, just in case:

Go into the code:

$ cd lams_learning

then copy main.jsp on top of mainnoflash.jsp and mainflash.jsp:

$ cp web/main.jsp web/mainflash.jsp
$ cp web/main.jsp web/mainnoflash.jsp

then redeploy the lams_learning:

$ ant deploy-war

Delete the jboss-5.1/server/default/tmp and jboss-5.1/server/default/work folders

and restart jboss.

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: Atif Rasheed

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Hello Ernie,

Thanks for your detailed input because last time you didn't advise to replace mainnoflash.jsp as well, you only asked for mainflash.jsp :)

However, I followed your instructions and it's still not working ... not sure what is going wrong as I don't see anything unusual in log files as well.

I can't insert images here so I am attaching a document, steps I followed with screenshots for your review.

Posted by Atif Rasheed

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Hi Atif,

I had a look at the attached document and I'm pretty certain that I know what's happening.

If you look at the messages above, I mentioned that we have been working on turning the learner and monitor interface to non-Flash interfaces.

However, on the last picture of your document, you are trying to open LAMS Author. But, LAMS Author is still 100% a Flash interface and probably will remain like this for some time.

The main reason for this is because LAMS Author require some features that are still quite complex to do with HTML5 and SVGs, like drag and drop, multiple level branching, etc.

So I think teacher will still be required to use Flash for creating sequences.

Having said that though, students would not longer require flash as their interface will be fully non-Flash. So they'll be able to use tablets or mobiles to access their LAMS sequence without loosing any functionality.

Same thing for teachers/tutors that need to monitor their lessons.

I hope this clarifies the scope a bit better.

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: Atif Rasheed

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Hi Ernie, my apologies I must have lost it some where in the conversation track. Didn't notice that Author interface is not mobile enabled at the moment. But you have rightly said that mobile interface for Author is not really necessary if Learner and Monitor interface are Mobile enabled.

However, I have tested the Learner interface and it's working great, will get back to you if we found any problems with it. When we should expect nonflash Monitor interface in CVS ?

Great thanks and have a great evening.

Posted by Atif Rasheed

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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> However, I have tested the Learner interface and it's working great, will get back to you if we found any problems with it. When we should expect nonflash
> Monitor interface in CVS ?

It's already there... have a look at this post above for details on how to access it.

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: Atif Rasheed

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Thanks, I was actually using my Moodle to access learner and monitor interface.

Posted by Atif Rasheed

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Ah, ok... so if you are coming from Moodle, you probably won't see it though.

Once we finished with this interface, we'll link it from Moodle. No worries.

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione