Dialang development

[dd d]

Hi,
   I'm an italian developer and languages student; I tried to use dialang some years ago, it seemed to me a really interesting project.
I mostly use linux, sometimes windows and mac.
Some questions:

 * is dialang released under any software license? is it open source software?
 * any interest in porting dialang to linux and mac platforms? java should help to be cross-platform
 * planning to develop a web-based version of dialang for Web and other devices (iOs,android,chrome)?

I searched this information myself in dialang web page (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/researchenterprise/dialang/about), with no success.
Just quoting from that page:

- "DIALANG now has no employees and no money" -

Ok, there's not a commercial license, probably.

- "Lancaster University is currently working to try to find a sustainable future for DIALANG" -

Sharing dialang project, in github (https://github.com/) or similar, could be a good start to enhance the project and make its future sustainable somehow ;)

Regards,
Dante.

[dd d]

Errata corrige: dialang Web page has answers to some of my questions :D (in the FAQ section [http://www.lancs.ac.uk/researchenterprise/dialang/dialang_faqs.htm]).

* is dialang released under any software license?

no

* is it open source software?

no

* planning to develop a web-based version of dialang for Web

yes

Still valid questions:

* any interest in porting dialang to linux and mac platforms?

* planning to develop a version of dialang for devices with operating systems like iOs, android or chrome?

Ciao,
Dante.

[Wim Oostindier]

Some schools of Hanze University have been using Dialang for quite some time now: Some10 years now.

Actually it helped us a lot to 'screen' our students (for example prospective Asian students) and to find their strengths and weaknesses.

Nice idea to set-up this platform.

Some data:

my name: Wim Oostindier - Teacher of Foreign Languages (Spanish, English, Dutch) Fluent speaker of German, French, familiar with Finnish.

Hanze University of Applied Sciences - International Business School (1250 students)

You can find my details about me in Linkedin

email: w.oost...@pl.hanze.nl

[Adrian Fish]

Hi Dante,

Welcome to the group. DIALANG isn't open source at the moment; when we wrote it under SOCRATES LINGUA funding there weren't any stipulations about releasing code under an open license. I work on a number of open source projects and am all for it, and if we get development funding from the EU an open source license will, I expect, be mandatory. I also expect we'll use something like GitHub or Google Code for hosting it, definitely git anyway ...

Regarding mobile devices: I think the first step would be to build a web based version using the same GUI design for ease of transition, then look at css for targeting different device sizes. If that proves unsatisfactory then we should look at native apps. Are you skilled in mobile app development?

Cheers,

Adrian.

[Adrian Fish]

Hi Wim,

Welcome to the group. I think your use case may be a widely used one. We use it here primarily as a research tool in linguistics but are considering just the case you descibe.

Cheers,

Adrian.

[dd d]

> Regarding mobile devices: I think the first step would be to build a web based version using the same GUI design for ease of transition, then look at css for targeting different device sizes. If that proves unsatisfactory then we should look at native apps. Are you skilled in mobile app development?

The idea of 'mobile devices' comes from the market demand; probably it's not really necessary in this moment porting Dialang to mobile app.
It seems that soon mobile devices (ipad or similar) could be used in schools, school books must be soon in epub format, and in some cases there should be native apps for classroom life. Do mobile devices completely substitute books at school? Maybe.
Not sure, but Web and mobile could be both really important sometime soon.
I just started to develop mobile apps.


Thanks for the reply ;)
Regards,
Dante.

[Adrian Fish]

No probs. It's good to hear some development ideas.

One of the main drivers for making it all web based would be the resulting ease in lab deployments, from the feedback we've had previously. The fact that the current software writes its cache to Program Files -> Dialang has always caused headaches for academic users with locked down machines. We should have though about that from the start really and made it easy to switch the cache location. Hindsight is a marvellous thing ...

Cheers,

Adrian.

[jqk...@gmail.com]

Hi, 

I'm a java developer and i was wondering why dialang doesnt work on linux or mac. I mean, dialang is a JAVA app, and therefor should run on any platform with proper lib and JRE.

I got it running on linux ubuntu. (following instruction here)

Basically : 

- wine install of dialang (wine allows to run windows app)

- download "Java Media Framework (JMF) 2.1.1e" from oracle's website (jmf-2_1_1e-alljava.zip), we need the zip file because only 1 lib matters to us

- extract jmf.jar from the zipfile to the root directory of dialang (default : $HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Dialang/)

- in a terminal go to dialang's root directory and run : java -cp client.jar:comms.jar:crimson.jar:jmf.jar net.dialang.client.Main

It runs (if i didnt forget any step). I just encountered few display problems, some text lines were cut and unreadable. I used the openJDK so i switched to oracle's jdk for linux but, the result was just the same. Maybe i missed something or what, but i didn't looked further.

Maybe you could do a zip package including that jmf.jar instead of just delivering an exe file. It would help mac&linux users, maybe with a warning that you do not ensure it will run perfectly or something ? 

[Adrian Fish]

Hi,

The problem in the past was just that the simplest installer around was for Windows. That's about it really. I also don't think Macs could even run Java code 15 years ago when DIALANG was being designed :) At that point also Linux was a specialist's platform (I was using Slackware at the time). The decision to target Windows was valid I'd say. Not now, obviously.

Lancaster is currently creating a web based version of the software. It'll look and work the same, but will all be web delivered. I'm doing the coding and am at the point of implementing the item screens. VSPT and SA are done and scored, so a lot of the work is already done. In other words there's little point getting the current desktop version running on different platforms as it has no future.

Thanks for taking a look although I'm sorry if you've wasted your time.

Cheers,

Adrian.