Cape Town, April 6th 2006
The Free Software Innovation Unit located in Information & Communication Services (ICS) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), and the African Virtual Open Initiative and Resources project (AVOIR) have released version 1.3.0 of their KINKY application framework and KEWL.NextGen e-learning system. KINKY and KEWL are Free Software and licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). UWC Vice Chancellor, Prof Brian O??Connell emphasized UWC??s continued and ongoing commitment to Free Software and collaboration within Africa.
KINKY is a recursive acronym that stands for ??KINKY Is Not KEWL Yet?, referring to the fact that the application framework is not the application, and indeed, KINKY can be used to build any kind of application that requires a web interface. KINKY is a modular PHP application framework for the rapid development of applications. ??Think of it as PHP on rocket fuel,? said project founder, Prof Derek Keats. KINKY now has over 250 modules, covering not only e-learning but more than 20 different applications.
Keats claims that there is no e-learning platform in the world right now in the league of KEWL.NextGen. He says he spent a few days prior to the release just taking a look at some of the more popular systems, and is very pleased by what the KEWL.NextGen team has been able to deliver. ??It is utterly world class,? he said
Not only that, says Keats, but we are so confident in KINKY that we are using it to develop our services oriented architecture and build all new applications and services for the University administrative systems. He said, ??The first of these is an 11 million investment in creating a Student Enrollment Management System (SEMS), announced last year. We use KINKY to run our own website at
, and will shortly be deploying it in a portal implementation to run the UWC portal and sub-portals.?According to FSIU Manager and lead developer, Paul Scott, this release includes some new modules, such as a wiki, but is mostly improvements to existing modules based what has been learned from users during the past year of the system's use. In particular, the results of extensive usability tests have been incorporated to make the system into what we believe is the most user friendly e-learning platform in the world.
Aside from the KEWL.NextGen implementation of KINKY, there are a number of other configurations. Because everything is abstracted, different kinds of systems can be built with the same code base. For example, kGroups http://kgroup.uwc.ac.za is an implementation to support group-based collaboration over the Internet.
This is probably the second last major release of the version 1 code, which works with PHP4 and mySQL. The architecture team have now build the version 2 of the KINKY framework, adding among other things support for service oriented architecture development. Conversion of existing modules to version 2 is expected to take 3 months. A complete integrated, realtime virtual classroom will also be included in version 2 when it is released later in the year. Meanwhile, version 1.4.0 will be released in May, and will have a full content management module added to it, along with improved translation tools.
AVOIR is a project to build capacity in software engineering in African Universities through the collaborative creation of Free Software. Aside from UWC, the Universities which are participating in the AVOIR project are the University of Jos (Nigeria), Universite Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar (Senegal), University of Ghana – Legon (Ghana), Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (Kenya), University of Nairobi (Kenya), Makerere University (Uganda), Uganda Martyrs University (Uganda), National University of Rwanda (Rwanda), University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Sokoine University of Agriculture (Tanzania), Catholic University of Mozambique (Mozambique) and The University of Eduardo Modlane (Mozambique). Financial support is provided by a research grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada, with the Free Software Innovation Unit also supported with research grants from the Department of Science and Technology (South Africa), Carnegie Corporation of New York, the United States Agency for International Development and UNESCO
KEWL.NextGen and all KINKY applications run on any platform that supports PHP4, including GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac OS-X, Solaris, etc.
The project can contacted on the web at http://avoir.uwc.ac.za/ and the code is available under the GNU GPL and available for download via the AVOIR website. Several test sites for KEWL.NextGen and other KINKY applications can be found at http://kngforge.uwc.ac.za