The story of eLAIX
eLAIX started as "Erlkönig" based on Dreamweaver in the project INGMEDIA, a cooperative project of six German Universities in 2001. The goal of the project was to establish eLearning in laboratory practical courses. We decided, not to reinvent the wheel concerning a tool, that was able to manage our eLearning offers. So our decision was to establish ILIAS as the learning platform for our needs. Concerning the generation of content however, we found the internal editor of ILIAS quite time consuming. On the other hand, most of the project members already had a lot of content saved as Word or Powerpoint files. That was the point when we decided to develop a converter to transfer word processing documents into a format that can be imported by ILIAS.
The next approach, that we called iLEX, was therefore based on OpenOffice. The main reason for this decision was, that an author can use a single document to provide his content for multiple purposes like doc, pdf, html, eBook and other formats. With iLEX we where able to transfer text, graphics and some other stuff to the ILIAS platform and we all have been happy.
I remember at the end of the project in 2004 a question of Fred Neuman, who himself was working on the same idea: "What about internal links?" That was the magic question, because the export algorithm, we used, exported paragraph by paragraph. Internal links however require first to read the complete document and then to export it in a second step.
I was a little bit fascinated about that. And because I didn't want to leave the ILIAS community, I decided to go on with iLEX even when the INGMEDIA project was finished. So I started a first conceptual paper for a complete technical redesign. It took me some days to define a solution, that stores the whole export related information of the documents content into an internal RAM-database (to avoid writing an interims data format on disk). From this internal database, that reflects recursive structures (tables in tables, frames in content containing frames and so on) and that also holds internal references, the export should finally be invoked.
After the concept was finished, I started with designing icons for the different functions. My whish to offer professional icons then lead me to some nice evenings learning GIMP. But to be honest, the first 4 icons are not self-made. They are partly modificated lendings from the GNOME project and the excellent Tango Icon projekt.
The new "eLAIX" was then born in February 2006, turning down the template mechanism and instead offering a toolbar, whos intension was to help authors in creating "clean" documents. Following I realized the different functions, rewrote the reading and exporting part and reorganized the project as a real OpenOffice extension. Other milestones have been the export of the design and the reimport of a learning module. All in all it took more than 2000 hours to realize this project till today and there are remaining enough ideas to continue the work...
eLAIX was made with the help of a very good working community. Without the help and code snippets of Andrew Pitonyak, Danny Brewer, Laurent Godard, Michael Dannenhöfer, Ian Laurenson and many other community members, eLAIX would never exist in the state it has today. A good example of the OpenSource spirit.
Apropos, you can participate this spirit by becoming an eLAIX partner, if you think that eLAIX is helpful and saves you time in creating ILIAS content.
Thank you!