Ep. 291
PILOS, an acronym for Platform for Interactive Live Online Seminars, is an open-source front-end platform designed to enhance the user experience of Big Blue Button (BBB), a web conferencing system. Born out of necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic, PILOS was developed at the TeachMiddleHessin University of Applied Sciences to address the chaos of scaling university classrooms for remote learning. Unlike Greenlight, another BBB front-end built on Ruby on Rails, PILOS was architected from scratch using Laravel (PHP) for the backend API and Vue.js for the user interface. This decoupled, modern architecture was chosen to overcome the limitations and architectural friction encountered with the monolithic structure of Rails, particularly its difficulty in handling the high concurrency and asynchronous demands of live online seminars. A key feature of PILOS is its built-in enterprise-level load balancer, which intelligently routes users to available BBB servers, preventing system crashes and ensuring session persistence. The platform also includes a translation layer using the Littler Button library to facilitate communication between the Laravel API and the BBB engine. PILOS is distributed as Docker images, simplifying deployment for university IT departments, and is licensed under LGPL 2.1, encouraging community engagement and contributions. The project emphasizes localization and provides detailed guides for installation, upgrades, and migration from Greenlight, showcasing its commitment to supporting educational institutions in their digital transformation.