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

[Ian Bicking]

Martin Langhoff wrote:
> On 9/6/06, Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> wrote:
>> Martin Langhoff wrote:
>> > Sounds good to me. Who should I be talking to if I want to integrate
>> > with such scheme?
>>
>> Me, in about one to two months.
> 
> Hi Ivan,
> 
> It's been about 2 monts - nag nag nag time ;-)
> 
> This thread covered a lot, including portable code and fairly complex
> trust models. My needs are a lot simpler - from the point of view of a
> web app running outside of the OLPC itself, do I have a means of
> trusting a user id and perhaps some user info from each OLPC.

We talked about using Open ID.  I still think that's a very good idea. 
In that model a child would set up a page that points to the OLPC Open 
ID servers.  (Probably pages would be automatically set up, but a child 
could set up multiple pages that point to the same server, so a child 
can relatively easily have multiple identities.)  The OLPC Open ID 
server would verify that they are who they say they are, but that would 
mostly happen behind the scenes.  You'd simply get an authenticated URI 
which would serve as the identity.  Well, Open ID 2 I believe has some 
options for sharing information in addition to authentication, and using 
i-names (which seem to look a lot like email addresses) in addition to 
URIs.  I haven't seen any of what Open ID 2 provides, so I'm a little 
vague on this stuff.

This seems to address a lot of the privacy concerns, and also gives you 
a clear and documented standard that you can target without doing 
anything specific to OLPC.  And there's already libraries out there for 
you to use.

Any additional user info would either have to be set up in your 
application, or we'd have to add more ways to get information (which is 
possible in Open ID, I believe, but opens up privacy questions).

-- 
Ian Bicking | ianb at colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org