Why Use The Bright API?
If you can use the SCORM Cloud or RusticiEngine API to get at your learner data, why bother to use the Bright API to just access the same data?
Here are a few things that we can think of…..
Fewer API calls to get the job done.
Bright is optimized for web delivery. This
Less Data Returned
With the Bright API, you can ratchet your requests down to return only the fields you need. This reduces how much data you need to fetch to render your page.
Faster than slow
Bright runs fast even when SCORMCloud is slow, or even down. Our back-end is self-syncronizing and doesn’t require SCORMCloud to even be online, except to launch a course.
Move it Closer
Bright Server can installed anywhere, including right next to your web server [and we mean literally right next to it]. This means you can optimize your round trip time. With direct SCORMCloud API calls, it’s AWS East in Virginia or bust.
Be Administrative
If you are driving your learner experience straight off data fetched from SCORMCloud, what do you do when that data is “wrong”? For example, a faulty course fails to post completion, and now your users are stuck and angry. With Bright, an administrator can override a course completion status, and then make that override stick.
See what you want to see.
SCORMCloud has reporting, but the model of the data you get is their data model. If you want your data into your own data model, you have to transform it. Heading down this road means polling SCORMCloud and maintaining shadow tables, which gets complicated fast. With Bright, we give you an easy mechanism to get your data into your format. You can report on XAPI data, too.
More Launch Information
SCORMCloud gives great information about individual launches within the SCORM world. Bright augments this by giving you the real-world information you need to support your users, such launch URL, IP Address, and User Agent/Browser Version for a particular course launch.
Go Custom
Do you have a one-off feature that requires a long-running transformation, or something else complicated that isn’t well suited for the back-end of a web-page request? Bright lets you bundle complex logic behind a custom web-services endpoint so you can move this complexity out of your web application.
Say goodbye to Polling and Shadow Tables
Through experience, we discovered that it was hard to get far in a website backed by SCORMCloud without shadow tables for courses and registrations. Once you have shadow tables, the next step is to start polling SCORMCloud to “pre-fetch” the data. In Bright, you can just leave all of the nasty details of this to the Bright backend.
Another Set of Eyes
Using Bright means you get a 2nd or 3rd pair of eyes on your project along with your team and SCORMCloud support. We work hand in hand with Rustici constantly and we have the relationships and experience to get operational issues ironed out, fast.
Why reinvent the wheel?
The Bright platform has developed from the ground up to make it easy to integrate SCORMCloud into any old website, and we’ve been at it for at least 6 years. You can leverage what we’ve learned as opposed to finding and solving the same problems over again yourself.
Create And Associate Complex Metadata
Another reason SCORMCloud implementations end up with messy shadow tables is the need to associate complex metadata with entities like courses, users, or registrations. Bright has a built-in metadata system that lets you store and associate this data without the dreaded shadow table anti-pattern.