Releases

• What's new in TRAX LRS 3.0?
• What's coming next?
• Starter vs Extended Edition

What's new in TRAX LRS 3.0?

TRAX LRS 3.0 takes most of the features of the 2.1 release, and gives them a new robust and modern architecture for the coming years. Its goal is also to improve several axis such as usability, simplicity, flexibility, controllability, extensibility and scalability.

Modern architecture

TRAX LRS 3.0 is based on a modern technical stack including:

• Laravel 11
• PHP 8.2 & 8.3
• VueJS 3 (composition API)
• Tailwind CSS
• Large database support: MySQL, PostgreSQL, TimescaleDB, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch
• Micro-service architecture based on Redis Stream

Usability

We designed a brand new UI to give you a better user experience:

• Dark and light modes
• Better navigability: top bar & side menu, switch between stores
• More xAPI filters, auto-completion
• More data exploration features: persons, groups, document IDs

Simplicity

Keeping things simple is key for a long-term maintenability, so we removed features that were underused:

• 5 predefined roles now replace the former custom roles edition.
• Clients can now be configured without having to create a specific access.
• The entity concept was removed.

Flexibility

Because there are so many use cases with an LRS, we wanted to give more flexibility:

• The management of user accounts is now centralized (no more located in each store).
• Users such as learners and data analysts can be restricted to one or several stores.
• Connections to external systems (LRS, files, databases) are now configured in a central place (no more in each import/export task).

Controllability

This is crucial to know what happens in your LRS and to keep the control on your data, so we added some new exciting features:

• A new dashboard to schedule and manage data processing tasks
• A new flexible logging system
• A configurable xAPI pipeline for each data source
• A new dashboard to check all the LRS settings

Extensibility

Because we want to give you the freedom to build what you want around TRAX LRS, you have now:

• A large collection of APIs to control your LRS
• An open architecture based on Redis Stream where you can plug your own micro-services

Scalability

Scalability was one of our biggest concerns, so we worked on several axis:

• Improvement of the relational database schemas
• Introduction of NoSQL databases support (MongoDB, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch)
• A micro-service architecture that gives you more control on the way you deploy your application

What's coming next?

With so much innovations introduced in the 3.0 release, we postponed some of our initial plans. But everything is ready to welcome these new features in the coming months.

xAPI 2.0 support

xAPI 2.0 officially became an open source standard throught the IEEE end of 2023, and the ADL LRS conformance test suite has been upgraded so support xAPI 2.0. So we are now ready to implement and test the new specification in TRAX LRS.

Performance improvements

Performances have already been improved with TRAX LRS 3.0 compared to version 2.1. But we want to go further thanks to the adoption of Laravel Octane, the implementation of a new caching strategy and the development of a new benchmarking tool.

Security improvements

As TRAX LRS 3.0 adheres to coding best practices, we already get all the proven security layouts of the Laravel framework. But we want to add more features to let you choose the right level of security for your LRS, such as stronger password rules, double authentication, and so on.

Starter vs Extended Edition

Like its predecessor, TRAX LRS 3.0 has been declined in 2 editions: the Starter Edition which is open source, and the Extended Edition which has a lot of additional features and is reserved to our contributors.

Here is an overview of the main differences between these 2 editions: