The story of eLAIX

When I started with the first conceptual paper for the new eLAIX in February 2006, it didn't took a long time to see, that keeping the technical concept of the existing iLEX was impossible. Turning down the template mechanism on its own had a hudge impact on the new programming concept, since the templates did store the metadata, they provided the different ILIAS paragraphs and last but not least, the templates included the export button. To get rid of the templates ment to find new external solutions for all the stuff that was embedded in the templates. Thus the idea of iLEX as a "real" AddOn was quiet a basic necessity.

One single feature, I wanted to implement, was the highly demanded possibility, to set internal links. That was definitely the point, that made clear:

iLEX had to be redesigned, because it did read and export paragraph by paragraph. Exporting a link to a later chapter however makes it necessary, that iLEX "knows" the complete document before exporting the first line of the content. It took me some days to define a solution, that stores the whole export related information of the documents content into an internal RAM-database (to avoid writing an interims data format on disk). From this internal database, that reflects recursiv structures (tables in tables, frames in content containing frames and so on) and that also holds internal references, the export is finally done.

After the concept was finished, I started with designing icons for the different functions. My whish to offer professional icons then lead me to some nice evenings learning GIMP. But to be honest, the last 4 icons are not self-made. They are partly modificated lendings from the GNOME project and the excellent Tango Icon projekt.

Following I realized the different functions, rewrote the reading and exporting part and improved the installer, that now shows the implemention of each icon. This step became necessary, because the icon-graphics are generated by code, what takes a time. All in all it took 780 hours to realize this project - without the documentation you're just reading.

eLAIX was made with the help of a very good working community. Without the help and code snippets of Andrew Pitonyak, Danny Brewer, Laurent Godard, Michael Dannenhöfer, Ian Laurenson and many other community members, eLAIX would never exist in the state it has today. A good example of the OpenSource spirit.

Apropos, you can participate this spirit by registering for an eLAIX Premium-Account, if you think that eLAIX is helpful and saves you time in creating ILIAS content.

Thank you!