the agora online meeting tool an update
TRANSCRIPT
The Agora Online Meeting Tool
http://agora.lancs.ac.uk
An update
IntroductionAgora:
• Means ‘now’ in Asturiano and Portuguese
• Is an online meeting tool, developed by Lancaster University intially using JISC money and is now funded by the ESRC
• Is an ancient Greek work meaning ‘meeting place’
Agora is simple to use
• Agora has been designed from the ground up to be simple to use.
• The user interface is consistent and intuitive.
Agora is useful
• Multi-way video conferencing with no limit on participants
• Desktop sharing
• Shared whiteboard
• Movie-casting
• Chat
Architecture• Agora service: a web application, deployable in any
servlet container that actually holds the meetings.
• Agora Console: another web application that serves up the meeting setup user interface
• Agora Portal Plugin: These plugins form the integration points with portal frameworks
Agora Service
• The Agora service is responsible for maintaining information about meetings in progress
• The service provides the software multicasting functionality for routing video, audio and message data between participants
Agora Console
• The Agora console is the area where users create meetings. The console interface is rendered in the portal plugin
• The console is deployed into a webapp container as a standard WAR file.
• A simple properties file, similar to Sakai’s, is used to wire the console to the service.
Agora Plugins
• The Agora console is surfaced in portal tools using a plugin.
• In the case of Sakai, this is a standard Sakai Tool, in the case of Moodle, this is a module.
• The plugin passes user lists through to the console so the meeting initiator can pick from a list of their group members
• The plugin also provides authentication services to the console
Open Source Statement
• Agora will be open sourced, probably under the Apache 2.0 license. An open source license is a requirement of our funders, JISC.
• At Lancaster we are heavily refactoring Agora to support multiple portal systems, so we do not want it forking now. Sakai itself did this in the early stages of the Mellon grant.
• When the architecture has been stabilised and documented (2 weeks approx.), we will start the open sourcing process in earnest.
Open Source Timeline
• 27/06/2007 - Re-architecture complete. V1 Feature set finalised. Apache 2.0 license applied. New binary release on Agora website.
• 06/07/2007 - Agora CVS opened up, JIRA setup. Agora developers worksite setup at Lancaster
• Sakai 2.5 ??
Current Work
• Portal plugin architecture• Windows taskbar popups• Standalone version• Improved codecs for Mac. Wrapping of
libavcodec libraries in JMF codec classes
• Improved Linux support, V4L 2 support will open up many more cameras.
