12 September 2011, 22:52

Thanks Heidi,

I have forwarded our thread discussion to our tech support, who have show interest in bringing BB and Mahara together.

Hopefully this will enrich our discussion and they will seek out more information.

Also a nod to Ian... who I was quoting in my previous comments, ascribing that quote to Paul. Sorry guys.

Anyway....I am glad this ball is rolling...

best

tm

13 September 2011, 4:08

Hello Heidi,

Thank you for making your development available on the plugins page.

Cheers

Kristina

13 September 2011, 13:49

The Web Services stack implemented for Mahara is moving along rapidly, and this is thanks largely to it initially being a port of the web services stack for Moodle 2.x (and the funding/support of the NZ Ministry of Education).

This has a number of spin off advantages - firstly it's feature rich, having support for:

• Authentication: User/Password, Tokens, and OAuth (including user controlled tokens)
• Protocols: REST, XML-RPC, SOAP (basic WSSE extensions, and SIG+ENC)

Other advantages are the testing tools, self documenting APIs, and the ability to write APIs that are plugins themselves, and you write once and are available through all channels (as above).

So far the API covers provisioning - Users (query/create/update/delete), Lists (friends lists), Groups (query/create/update/delete,members), and Institution membership (query/request/decline/invite/add/remove).

As well as the unit testsuite, there are examples in the documentation (https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/Plugins/Artefact/WebServices), and the example clients (https://gitorious.org/mahara-contrib/artefact-webservice/trees/master/exampleclients) show the usage of all the existing API functions.

The OAuth documentation has yet to be updated (I was still coding it over the weekend), but it has been tested with standard PHP, and Python libraries and works with Google Apps Script - which once we have an artefact API - I think would make a great learning exercise for (K12) students to either write their own AppInventor application, or Google Sites integration (Apps Script) with dynamic access to their own content.

Further advantages are that because the web services stack mirrors the Moodle one - further integration with Moodle will be simple - infact there is scope for Mahara to directly mimic the Moodle Hub API (where practical) and join the cluster.