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

[Tom Hoffman]

On 9/3/06, Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?
>
>  - 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?

These aren't really Sugar questions but they are important questions
about moving this kind of data around K-12 schools in general.  There
is one mature specification which is used primarily in the US called
SIF, the Schools Interoperability Framework <http://sifinfo.org>.  It
uses a publish/subscribe model to move XML data objects around a
school via HTTPS.  The way it is implemented would be considered dated
by anyone reading this list, but it is fairly straightforward and
actually works.

There is no awareness or uptake of SIF in the open source community,
outside of people who have talked to me, in part because there is no
free implementation of the Zone Integration Server (ZIS) that acts as
the data router in the SIF model, so I've finally just started writing
one in Python, called TinyZIS <http://tinyzis.org>.  It's about 80%
done (just about 1000 lines), and I hope to finish in the next couple
weeks.

There is a lot of potential to expand the spec to both handle more
international data models and also to take advantage of more up to
date technologies like Bonjour and perhaps DBus to create a more
peer-to-peer implementation useful for the OLPC environment, but
that's a ways away.  Once I finish the server, getting Moodle to talk
to it will be one of the next big steps.

Btw, I live in Rhode Island, so if anyone at MIT ever wants me to show
TinyZIS or SchoolTool to them, I'll be happy to drive up for a demo.

--Tom