In a few words, OpenOLAT is a Web Application which run in Tomcat. It's a multi-layers application.
If I start from the top, we have the GUI layer. OpenOLAT has its own GUI framework known as Brasato. It is based on the MVC concept, you can see some demos of its capabilities in the tab "gui_demo". You can activate this tab with the property:
guidemo.enabled=true
in your olat.local.properties
The controller part (the controller extends one of this class: BasicController, FormBasicController...) is responsible for the workflow. Each controller has a "component" or a "container" which is an instance of the view. This component will render a HTML fragment.
The controllers use the managers and services to do most of the business logic.The managers are responsible to manage the database. For example the ForumManager has methods to create forums, threads, messages... to delete them, to update them... All these managers and services have dependencies between them. We use the Spring Framework to manage the dependencies, configuration properties and some other things.
Than you have the database layer which start with our Hibernate mapping up to the database itself with the different tables and views. OpenOLAT supports MySQL and PostgreSQL.
I hope I give you an idea of what OpenOLAT is made of.
Best regards
Stéphane Rossé
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