Survey the right way!

While working for an advertising agency in Amsterdam more than 7 years ago, I started to write my own extensions for TYPO3. The advertising agency was specialized in kids & youngsters and wanted to have some kind of a network to do research amongst these kids & youngsters. Because we were using TYPO3 for some time for all our clients and ourselves, this was the main choice to build this network upon.   Pbsurvey was born.

This was my first big extension and although I had no intention at that time to make it public, I showed it to Ben van 't Ende at the first Dutch/Flemish TYPO3 Usergroup day. He was talking about a new project they've started which involved a survey extension. I already had the first working version and kind of pushed it into his hands. They stopped their development immediately.

The code was IMHO not beautiful and definitely not structured (spaghetti code), and after a while I decided to rewrite the whole extension completely, including more features which would improve it. This version is still on the TYPO3 Extension Repository, although some features have been added and some bugfixing has been done.

With programming you are learning all the time. I've learned a lot about OOP, DDD and more programming techniques, but also new languages or frameworks, like the immense popular Jquery and ExtJS.

And now pbsurvey looks old again and needs to be rewritten, again! This has been in my mind for quite some time, but never had the time or the good ideas to start with it.

A friend of mine knows a lot about SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) which is used in e-learning systems a lot. It defines communications between client side content and a host system called the run-time environment, but also defines how content may be packaged into a transferable ZIP file called "Package Interchange Format". The last part is very interesting, because you can transfer content from one e-learning system, like Moodle, to another, like Blackboard, without converting the data.

For tests there is a similar specification called the IMS Question and Test Interoperability specification (QTI). It defines a standard format for the representation of assessment content and results, supporting the exchange of this material between authoring and delivery systems, repositories and other learning management systems. It allows assessment materials to be authored and delivered on multiple systems interchangeably. It is, therefore, designed to facilitate interoperability between systems.

I love specifications. It makes the world a bit easier (if there wasn't a company called Microsoft who ruined the HTML specification). And the main advantage of the QTI specification is they have thought about, well, (almost) everything. So I don't have to invent the wheel again.

Because most of the TYPO3 users are from Germany, some of you will be wondering what SCORM and QTI is all about. In the Netherlands e-learning systems, which are compliant to these specifications, are used a lot in educational institutions like universities. But when talking to Germans related to universities it seems they haven't heard of it, or worse, not using it. The American Army is using it. Or better, Shell is using it for their internal education worldwide.

But I'm drifting. I was talking about pbsurvey. During the next months I will continue (I already did some work) work on a completely new version. But with a different extension key. Mads Brunn was so kind to hand over the extension key 'survey' to me a year (or two) ago. Survey will be based on the QTI 2.1 specification and the combination Extbase/Fluid.

It will be ready for the future.