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Development: More Information for Developers

important

Make sure that you downloaded the OLAT war file and read the installation documentation before you start developing for OLAT. We encourage all of you to switch over to the OLAT 7.2 Release. The whole update process after changes is much more easier with the Mercurial history.



OLAT repository Topology


OLAT repository on Mercurial

The decision in 2011 to replace CVS with Mercurial results in changes to the working practices of OLAT and its Community which are illustrated in the diagram on the right and described in detail below. The OLAT Community Mercurial repositories are hosted under http://hg.olat.org/repos

There will always be official OLAT “release” repositories that will be publicly available and are both stable and production ready. Such repositories are hosted internally by OLAT and are mirrored on the Community server from where anyone can clone them. In addition to these repositories there are several other development repositories on which the OLAT Team are working. These are not publicly visible but become available as soon as work is completed and they have been fully tested at which point they are merged into a release repository and made available to everyone.

OLAT contributors and partners are encouraged to setup their own internal repository and testing infrastructure and to clone the public Community repositories to use this as the basis for their development. Once a contribution is considered ready for release it should be made accessible via URL at which point it can be pulled by OLAT into a staging branch within the OLAT infrastructure where the necessary code reviews, testing and quality assessment may take place. If acceptable the contribution may then be merged into a release repository and made available to everyone via the public mirror.

In addition to Mercurial the Community server continues to host a number of other important development services. These include:

  • Nexus an artifact repository manager from which compiled assets, example courses, documentation and other resources can be found. This replaces the legacy Artifactory repository which will be discontinued as soon as OLAT 7.1.x is decommissioned.
  • Fisheye a source code browsing and inspection tool to examine the OLAT release code
  • JIRA an issue tracking tool in which users can entry potential bugs they have found

Bug and Feature Development Tracking

For bug tracking and enhancement issues we use JIRA. Go to bugs.olat.org to see which bugs are open or already fixed and which features are in the development process. If you find a new bug please do post that bug on our developers' mailing list. If we can reproduce the bug we will add it to the bug tracking system. Please do always search for existing bug reports before you send a mail. To watch what is committed and by whom visit our OLAT Community Mercurial service:

Installation and Administration Documentation

The technical documentation explains the installation process and gives you hints on how to customize your OLAT installation. This documentation is only available in English and updated frequently. The single-page version is identical to the multiple-pages version but rendered as one big HTML page for better searching and printing. Many thanks to all those developers who contributed to OLAT's technical documentation! Special thanks go to the MELS development team who wrote most of the documentation. More technical manuals and information can be found in the Development section.

If you are still working with an older OLAT 6.x server please refer to the OLAT 6.3 installation documentation.

New OLAT 6 layout concept based on YAML

OLAT 6 and the underlying brasato framework have a totally new layout concept based on the YAML framework. Using YAML and the new brasato framework OLAT 6 will offer a lot of improvements towards clean, browser-independent and accessible layout. Please have a look at the following technical documentation if you plan to adapt the OLAT layout to your needs.

Other documents by our community

At the University of Leipzig Prof. Gräbe is using OLAT in his Knowledge Environment Engineering Seminar. Students have done some quite interesting research papers about OLAT there: