Refresh for www.bigbluebutton.org

While the developers are working on finishing up a new release for BigBlueButton, the main site www.bigbluebutton.org just got an upgrade as well.



This updated site focuses on introducing BigBlueButton to new users more quickly so they can experiment and explore its features with others.

Phidgets

Phidgets def. A phidget is a physical representation and/or implementation of a GUI widget.

Check out this YouTube video of a raise hand phidget created by Yunatio Li (yuntao2006 at gmail with a dot com), a graduate student at the University of Carleton. Yunatio's supervisor is professor Michael Weiss.

This video demonstrates how an instructor could be notified, by a physical device, when a remote student raises their hand during a presentation in BigBlueButton. Here's another video that demonstrates logging into BigBlueButton using a smart card reader.

Very cool!

Open Source Components

We have just finished creating a page listing all the Open Source components used to create BigBlueButton. Turns out that there are over 14 different components, click here to view the list.

Release 0.6!

We're releasing BigBlueButton 0.6 today. The major change in this release is the new integrated VoIP module. That's right, you don't have to use a phone or skype anymore to connect to the voice conference, just connect your headset and click the shiny new icon.

Migrating to the Mate Framework

When BigBlueButton started, we used the Cairngorm framework. Then we switched to PureMVC. Now, we're switching to Mate.

While switching to different frameworks takes time and energy, you gain not only by using a better framework, but because the switch forces you to refactor code you've developed since the last time you did it.

Mate is a declarative programming framework for Flex. It lets you write business code the same way you write your Flex UI - using mxml tags. Of course, mxml code simply gets compiled to ActionScript. Mate abstracts this AS code for you, and lets you write clean, simple, minimalistic code.

And because Mate is centered around Events, the code you write is decoupled as there are no direct object-to-object calls, except when you want them

While Mate sounds great, it still has limitations. The framework provides components for most common tasks, such as calling HTTP Services, SQL queries, RemoteObjects, etc... However, when we started using Mate we noticed a lack of component for handling calls to Remote SharedObjects.

Luckily Mate is extensible, so we created our own SharedObjectInvoker. You can read about it and get the source here

We got the BigBlueButton Virtual Machine (VM) working and ready for download. This means you can run your own BigBlueButton server. The VM also serves as a complete development environemtn as well.

Check out this video (it shows how to run the VM and gives an example of makinga change to the client). Try downloading the VM and running it yourself. You'll need VMWare Player for Windows or Unix, or VMWare Fusion for Mac.

To give us feedback, please post to the BigBlueButton-Dev mailing list. Enjoy.

One challenge with delievering open source software is the number of required components. In BigBlueButton, we have red5, activemq, swftools, mysql, ngingx, and so on.

For developers, there is lots of documentation at our Google Code Site on how to setup a developer environment, but that's for technical people who know their way around the command line.

To make it easier to try out (and develop for) BigBlueButton, we been working on packaging our system as a virtual machine that you could download and run within VMWare Player. We're testing this internally now and should have something to share with you shortly.