[school-discuss] Exercise 1 revised

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

I am not sure if I have your collective consent to do this on this mailing
list, so I will do it and then maybe apologize and move to a different list:

:-)

Exercise 1 (Revised jan 27)
----------

(Thanks to Odile, Gunnar, Frances, Doug and Steve for your influent correspondence)

in which we call active programming participants to send us (or me privately
and i will collate all on one page) a URL which gives RAW XML which contains
a real school name (or more) and real participating teachers /
administrators /system integrators (i.e. yourselves)  in the Steve_XML:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<Message>

<School>
<School_Name>Roberts Education Centre</School_Name>
<School_ShortName>REC</School_ShortName>
<School_Id>1001</School_Id>
<User Type="Teacher">
<User_Fullname>Bruno Vernier</User_Fullname>
<User_Userid>vernier</User_Userid>
</User>
<User Type="Administrator">
<User_Fullname>Frances Long</User_Fullname>
<User_Userid>frances</User_Userid>
</User>
</School>

</Message>

the above shows one school, and 2 users

the simplest is to cut and paste , modify with your data and store into an
otherwise clean empty webpage.  There is nothing shameful about writing xml
directly by hand or cut and paste.  It is one of the reasons why XML is so
popular; it is always possible to modify by hand with any editor,
something that cannot be done to SQL data, or any of the binary-style
storages.

The more ideal way of doing it is to write a program (which will be a CGI)
which extracts that information from existing software in your schools...
that way it all becomes automatic; when the original data changes, it gets
updated via CGI to calling ZIS-like programs

In my case, I used the first method, so I'd have something up and running
today.  I intend to rewrite it later as a proper CGI taking the data from a
unix passwd file where I keep information about staff login-names ... but
first I must add another criterion for whether each staff member wants to
participate in this exercise or not and only display those who do.

Another reason I choose cut and paste is that I am pretty sure this might
not be quite the final schema for the XML we choose as our standard so I
want to easily change it by straight editing between reading postings here :-)

I think it will be rare when two un-associated school/school districts will
have the same CGI method to extract such information... and that is one of
the important lessons of this exercise;  there ain't gonna be a downloadable
program that will take care of this for everyone... but we can start
collecting the various techniques each of us used to make it easier for the
second wave of participants!


in exercise 2 , we will combine all the data to produce various reports

in exercise 3, we will extend the interopable data to include other
educational data maybe like available rooms, courses, resources, etc...
by then we will have clearly seen the need for a standard XML format, etc...

Each future exercise is intended to build up a real demonstration of the
power of interopability, to grapple with the obstacles, to build up
documentation of the various tools and tricks that work (and that don't work)
and to provide a secure beach-head for the second and third wave of
participants (a little bit of D-Day Normandy Beaches analogy here)

Bruno