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

[Ian Bicking]

Martin Langhoff wrote:
> - Does Sugar have XUL support or the OLPC include xulrunner? If so, I
> may write a XUL-based "smart" moodle client. That's a lot of work
> though...

If you are thinking in terms of offline operation, there might be 
simpler strategies that could be generally used by server-side apps, 
without making something Moodle-specific.

For instance, an interaction that a student might have with Moodle is to 
participate in a forum or respond to something.  Typically you do this 
with a form.  So, maybe we could have a way that the student could fill 
out the form offline, and have it submitted when they go back online.  I 
see two strategies:

* Actually allow the form to be submitted, but storing the request to be 
sent later.  The student gets a message to this effect (instead of a 
normal response) and there's some way to view and manage these queued 
requests.  As soon as they go online the requests are submitted, and the 
responses are probably queued up so that the student can look at them later.

Or, another strategy:

* The student can fill in any form, and "bookmark" the page with the 
filled-in information.  Then when they are online they can go back to 
the bookmark and potentially just hit "submit".  This isn't a 
traditional bookmark of course -- it's transient and contains form 
information, and probably the student should be reminded when they come 
online that they have these forms waiting to be submitted.


These both still rely on the content being deliverable in a static 
self-consistent form.  So Moodle would have to indicate somehow what 
makes the complete set of pages for some module.  Also, forms should be 
complete -- a multi-form submission process won't work offline.  Clever 
Ajax also won't work (and generally the latency might make Ajax form 
techniques unsatisfying even when the students are online).  Non-Ajax 
client-side Javascript *will* work (and very nicely, I would think).

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