[OLPC-devel] Integration with web apps (and Moodle specifically!)

[Martin Langhoff]

Hola!

(Sorry about the cross-post -- feel free to split discussion as you see fit.)

I am looking at Sugar and the underlying OLPC OS, trying to figure out
how/where integration with web apps would work. My main goal is to
have a meaningful integration with Moodle (a PHP-based LMS) -- but I
am open to other interesting things to be found along the way.

Links to TFM welcome -- I have been following the deve@ list and
reading the wiki. The areas I am trying to understand currently are

 - Identity mgmt. How does the OS deal with user accounts, student
identities and is there any way to assert that identity to a server?
(Will Ident or something equivalent be available?) I am mostly
interested in web apps so something Sugar-based is good enough for me.

 - Group mgmt. Will the OS, Sugar or any other layer know about
meaningful groups of users for learning activities? Something I can
loosely treat as class or course group? Is the group mgmt aware of the
teacher role?

 - One Laptop Per Teacher. Will teachers have an OLPC machine of some
kind? Will it be different? Perhaps better suited for a webserver?
Able to run/install more software?

 - One Laptop Per School. Same questions as above...

As you can see, there are plenty of preconceptions here about
established  groups, teacher roles and centrality of schools, and I am
not even sure they apply to OLPC. So I am happy to read TFM about the
usage scenarios and adapt my thinking to them.

 - Several Sugar API questions (to be followed up on sugar ML, but
perhaps there's an API plan somewhere). Can webpages trigger Sugar
events? What events does Sugar trigger, and can they be propagated to
a web server? Plugin API for Sugar?

My initial thinking is to

 - make Moodle easily installable wherever it needs to be with an
OLPC-tailored configuration,

 - tune Moodle for the platform (shrink the memory footprint for
server and client),

 - implement SSO with whatever facilities Sugar or the OS provides,

 - and integrate Moodle with Sugar where meaningful (add
sugar-specific activities in Moodle, for starters).

Most of this belongs to a web-app framework for OLPC. Either there is
one for me to use... or there's a task for me to build one ;-)

Phew, what a long list of words I've made. If you read this far,
THANKS for your patience.

cheers,


martin