We’re pretty excited about the potential (and ever growing reality) of the SCORM Cloud. Over the last year or two, besides putting the SCORM Cloud services out there for use, we created tools to plug into it. The biggest of these is the SCORM Cloud website. Besides the SCORM Cloud site, we produced integrations for open source learning systems such as Moodle and Sakai, we created a plugin that integrates with WordPress, and we even created an application to work within the Google Apps for Domains.
But this isn’t about those applications. This is about the code behind those applications.
Each of those integrations includes a key element that aids in the integration process. They all use an API library to communicate with the SCORM Cloud. Over the years, we have written a few libraries to make working with the API easier. These libraries cover 4 different languages: Java, C#, Python, and PHP.
After 18 months of building libraries that sort of look alike and sort of cover all the basic functionalities of the SCORM Cloud, we found that maintaining these libraries was becoming difficult, and using them was more difficult than it needed to be.
We therefore spent the last month creating some uniformity across the libraries and filling out basic functions where they were lacking. We have also created and filled in samples for the basic calls in each of the languages so that you can see how things should work using the libraries.
We also have new documentation available for building integrations. The new API documentation hasn’t really changed much in content, but the libraries documentation now covers the calls that exist uniformly across all libraries. In addition, we have put all of the libraries out on a public repository on github, where anyone can download them and even contribute to the projects.
The libraries don’t yet provide exhaustive coverage of the full breadth of the SCORM Cloud API, but they do cover enough to create a well functioning application capable of managing courses and training via the SCORM Cloud. (As a hint, the Java library is most complete – that’s what our SCORM Cloud site uses.) With that said, we welcome input about areas that are lacking or could use improvement. Whether you fill in the holes or you just let us know what they are, we want these libraries to be living projects and we want them to be extremely useful and effective.
If you are new to developing for the SCORM Cloud, the best place to start is here. If you have ideas, comments, or questions, then the forums are a great place for you. We want to know how you want to use the SCORM Cloud. Don’t be a stranger.
