[seul-edu] [Fwd: Re: Question about Rapla]

[Doug Loss <drloss@suscom.net>]

-----Forwarded Message-----

From: Christopher Kohlhaas <zimt@gmx.de>
To: Doug Loss <drloss@suscom.net>
Subject: Re: Question about Rapla
Date: 16 May 2003 00:49:14 +0200

Hello Doug,

the initial Rapla development came out of a universtary context, so
the primary target are (still) universities, and there are some
university that use Rapla.

Schools are the second target and some desing descision were made only
to tailer Rapla for use in schools. Unfortunaly we don't get much
feedback and tracking down the log-path of our wiki doesn't show in
which context Rapla is used. I will setup a survey as soon as I finish
my thesis and then I can provide you with more information the.

Currently I know only of one school that is using Rapla and that's
the school where my mother works. You can't count that, because I've
done the setup.

Besides that, there is another serious issue that will certainly
prevent the distribution of Rapla with the ISO.

Rapla is a Java-program. We made this decision because we needed
windows compatibility. But there are some serious issues with java and
free software. The java-JDK from SUN is not free-software. There exist
some free implementations, but they currently don't implement all
features of java. Especially the swing-GUI is missing.

The Rapla-Client is using this features and won't work without them. 
The Rapla-Server however doesn't use this features and I will work on
compatibility with free java implementations.

The server provides a HTML-Interface, which is platform independet.
But at the time of writing, only read-only access is implemented, which
makes it unusable without the GUI-client. It will take some time to
resolve this issues.

Suns java is included in Redhat or Suse but it's not included in
Debian for licensing issues, so I doubt it can be included in your
ISO.

Hopefully Rapla can be part of a future version of your iso and I
would like to offer any help in packaging Rapla if it will be
included.

Regards Christopher



On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 05:43:26PM -0400, Doug Loss wrote:
> Christopher,
> 
>    As you may know, we're working on an ISO of educational software 
> <http://www.seul.org/edu/iso.html> for Linux at the SEUL/edu project.
> Our main requirement for applications to be included on this ISO is that
> they be scholastically useful (we're focusing on K12 schools).  We've 
> been evaluating as many of the apps that we know about as we can, but 
> the effort is languishing as many volunteer projects do.  I've 
> determined that any app that is currently being used in one or more 
> schools has de facto demonstrated that it is scholastically useful and 
> has passed our Phase 2 evaluation.
> 
>    That brings me to my question.  Is Rapla currently in use in a
> school?  If so, I can put it on the Phase 2 list.  Thanks for your help!
> 
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> Doug Loss              All you need in this life is
> drloss@suscom.net      ignorance and confidence, 
>                        and then success is sure.
>                          Mark Twain
> 
> 
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Doug Loss              All you need in this life is
drloss@suscom.net      ignorance and confidence, 
                       and then success is sure.
                         Mark Twain