Alex Little

Had some discussions yesterday with the FlashMeeting guys as to how we could integrate MSG and FlashMeeting in some way, the upshot was that we’re going to look at developing an API for MSG so that presence info can be embedded in other web applications – simply stick a few references to JavaScript files in your application, add the tags for who and where you’d like presence info displayed and then the page will automatically display presences for those users (and keep them up to date).

In fact this morning I’ve been working on a little demo of how this could work, so I’ve got a plain html page running on my desktop PC which is calling the relevant JavaScript files on my development Moodle server – and all seems to be working well, it automatically logs you in to MSG (if you aren’t already). Next step is some more generalisation of the code and getting it moved over to the actual MSG server.

The main issue that we’ll have is with authentication, but I think we’ve got a method for coping with this. Essentially the MSG server needs to know how to authenticate the user, before the user can be logged in (and their contacts presences displayed). So, suppose I have Website X where I would like to display presences and I needed to have logged in to this website (so I’ve got a cookie). When I call the JavaScript initialisation function for MSG, I pass it the authentication type (in this case ‘WebsiteX’) and an array of authentication parameters (which would include my cookie). JavaScript calls the connect service in BuddyXML (on MSG server) providing these authentication details. BuddyXML then knows how to authenticate the cookie that’s passed (i.e. in this case to call a validate service running on Website X) and can automatically log the user in to MSG, on the basis that we trust Website X.

Had almost an all day meeting with Ernie from LAMS today which was very productive, and I now have a much clearer idea as to what we are doing within the scope of this project, especially for the coding that we need to do, the architecture, the APIs etc. I need to get the notes from this meeting written up into a proper document and include the whiteboard diagrams (scrawls?!) we came up with. Once I’ve got this written I’ll post a link up so everyone can have a look.

These are some of the areas we should be able to get started on next week:

• Sorting out which IMS Enterprise Service to use – need to contact Sam Easterby-Smith about this
• Set up a project on Sourceforge to store our code for the Moodle Group Module
• Find out more about how to create modules with Moodle
• Install the LAMS module for Moodle so we can have a play with this
• Define more use cases
• Start thinking about how the user interface for setting up the groups would look
• Contact the MINTED group (another JISC funded project under the demonstrator strand) at Sussex Uni, as they are looking at doing very similar work, and we don’t want to duplicate effort.