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

[Ivan Krstić]

Martin Langhoff wrote:
> That's IPC AFAIK... from the D-Bus Tutorial it's for

Sorry, we keep context-switching faster than I can catch on. I meant to
say that D-Bus is the mechanism that we'll use for the local
applications to talk to the identity service and other similar services
on the machine.

> - 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?

These I haven't thought about yet, and probably won't be the person
doing so. Not yet sure who will.

> When a user connects via HTTP is there a way to authenticate the
> user transparently? How?

There will probably be a mechanism to do this, for some value of
'transparent'. There are strong privacy concerns, but for some whitelist
(e.g. the school server), authentication with transparency is a
reasonable goal, and one I intend to support.

> - Are there school administration tools Moodle should communicate with?

-ENOTMYDOMAIN. Also, we're still not devoting any thought past the bare
minimum to the details of server applications, so I think you'll have to
wait a bit to get many of these answers.


> Will those machines actually have RPM/Yum/APT? AFAICS, the OLPC OS
> image does away with the overhead of carrying a package manager...

I'm still not entirely convinced that's the case, but Chris is a better
person to speak to this. I'm pretty sure we'll provide some form of
package management on the school servers.

> 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 ;-)

This would be very useful work, particularly if you were willing to
document it as it was happening, so it can serve as a manual for other
application developers wishing to do the same to their own applications.

-- 
Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D