Re: [school-discuss] XML test

[vernier@vc.bc.ca (Bruno Vernier)]

On Sat, Jan 26, 2002 at 09:45:00PM -0800, Tonnesen Steve wrote:
> 
> Okay, so my first public XML test fell on it's face.  :)
> 
> I was missing quotes around my attributes, and somebody put schools and
> users in my k12admin demo data with some strange characters that were
> getting rejected as not being UTF-8 encoded.  It should be well-formed
> now.


OK it works and I get a raw XML file which I could then XSL Transform into
anything from a listing of schools, a listing of students, statistics about
the number of student in each school, etc... 

Now if other schools and/or school districts also offer up the same information 
via a cgi script that will likely be different for each different backend
software/database, then anyone authenticated, say a school district office,
could setup up a centralized database of all schools and students participating.

Everytime there is a change to the demographics (student leaves or joins),
the XML produced should change , and that change should be detected by the
"ZIS" servers downstream.  

The next step in this experiment/research is for me to produce a similar
output (unfortunately we are all restricted to using fake student data) and
then a third location can unify the two XML into some useful, nice looking
listing which would automatically change when either one of us make a change.

----

for something completely different, I have set up an RSS on a server showing
changes to the resources in a particular folder in the school server (the
content is real but meaningless in this context), what is interesting is
that I programmed it (using CMF on ZOPE) to "syndicate" every hour... which
means that if there are any new items or changes to anything in that folder,
the new RSS output is recalculated every hour.  

So an uphill "ZIS" server could conceivably collect changes made to, say,
news items from all the schools in a district and compile them into one
column of all news from all schools on one page, updated hourly (or more
frequently as per settings)

http://robertscap.bc.ca/rec/REC/Eduml/RSS  (also in raw XML of the standard RSS
variety, here)

Bruno