[sugar] Integration with web apps (and Moodle specifically!)

[Dan Williams]

On Sun, 2006-09-03 at 17:15 +1200, Martin Langhoff wrote:
> On 9/3/06, Ivan Krsti? <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> wrote:
> > Martin Langhoff wrote:
> > > One is the API to talk to sugar and other services (identity, group mgmt).
> >
> > D-Bus.
> 
> That's IPC AFAIK... from the D-Bus Tutorial it's for
> 
> * Communication between desktop applications in the same desktop
> session; to allow integration of the desktop session as a whole, and
> address issues of process lifecycle (when do desktop components start
> and stop running).
> 
> * Communication between the desktop session and the operating system,
> where the operating system would typically include the kernel and any
> system daemons or processes.
> 
> The kind of scenario I am considering is with Moodle on a school/teacher server
> 
>  - Can Moodle ask what user accts are valid in this (school) context? How?
> 
>  - Can Moodle ask what groups/courses are valid in this context and
> who's in them? How?

That's almost completely outside the domain we're working in.  We're
providing a framework for that sort of collaboration, but we're
_certainly_ not developing a school system here, for the huge reason
that:

- OLPC is targetted at a large number of disparate school environments.
We certainly cannot be sure of how classes are run, and how schools are
run.  We can't, shouldn't, and won't impose a western-style class
structure and school organization structure with this project.

Some schools are 30 kids with all the grades together taught by the same
teacher outside.  That doesn't lend itself towards a centralized
structure with a school server.  Others are much more centralized with
defined schedules, grades/classes, classrooms, etc.

These things are hugely country-defined and the same solution that fits
eg urban Brazil wouldn't even necessarily fit rural Brazil.  Therefore,
we're leaving any sort of this heavy school administration
infrastructure up to countries and other projects themselves.

We may provide a concept of "class", in the sense of a loose group of
children who may be similar skill level and be together during the day,
but there aren't any promises.

Furthermore, the laptop has to be useful in a small system without
dedicated application server.  So it is much more of a peer-to-peer
model where we can't guarantee access to a school server.  So you can't
rely on being able to verify people by accessing the server before
talking to them.  What happens when the child takes the laptop home?
Still has to be able to talk to people around even though the school
isn't necessarily contactable.

Dan

>  - When a user connects via HTTP is there a way to authenticate the
> user transparently? How?
> 
>  - Are there school administration tools Moodle should communicate with?
> 
> > > The other is deployment framework for the school or teacher machine,
> > > which is probably more powerful, or (more importantly) just dedicated
> > > to being a server.
> >
> > I'm not sure I understand what you mean by 'deployment framework'. Can
> > you elaborate?
> 
> Will those machines actually have RPM/Yum/APT? AFAICS, the OLPC OS
> image does away with the overhead of carrying a package manager...
> 
> > > But this is a for a client-server scenario. Clients are
> > > using Sugar+Gecko I assume
> >
> > Right. Sugar uses XULRunner, which embeds Gecko.
> >
> > > so I will be focusing on trimming HTML to
> > > see if we can lower in-memory footprint of rendered pages inside
> > > Gecko.
> >
> > In general, unless you have outrageously bad markup that e.g. contains
> > all styling inline, your time is probably better spent just making sure
> > you don't output any very long pages, instead offering pagination
> > wherever possible.
> 
> Is that based on actual benchmarks? My experience is that some
> webpages, while not being significantly larger than others can take
> many times as much RAM. The approach I'd like to take is to profile
> them and go after the worst offenders and/or at least nag the relevant
> Moodle module maintainers ;-)
> 
> cheers,
> 
> 
> 
> martin
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