This is a talk for the Loughborough University Computer Society about the nitty gritty of my.Lboro, our new student portal site. It touches on cloud APIs, Zend and much, much more!

1. The Future is Here:
It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed
Martin Hamilton
http://martinh.net
@martin_hamilton
Photo by Sarath Sreekumar via Flickr

3. my.Lboro
• New site bringing together student info:
–Google Email, Calendar and Docs
–Learn (Moodle) VLE
–Library Services
–Newsfeeds and key links
• This talk: How it works :-)

4. App, or website?

5. But First…

7. Diagram credit: Andy Powell

11. About Me

16. Now Back to The Programme…

17. RSS/ATOM
• It’s all around you
<link href=“…” rel=“alternate”
type=“application/rss+xml” />
• But it might need a clean up
– Consider implications of
embedded HTML

19. ATOM Sample with Namespaces
<item>
<title>Cake/Pie.</title>
<pubDate>Mon, 12 Dec 2011 00:37:46 +0000
</pubDate>
<link>http://lsucs.org.uk/threads/cake-pie.5963/
</link>
<guid>http://lsucs.org.uk/threads/cake-pie.5963/
</guid>
<author>Lord_Infamy</author>
<dc:creator>Lord_Infamy</dc:creator>
<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
</item>

20. Newsfeeds on my.Lboro
RSS aggregator written in Perl. Choses
newsfeeds based on staff/student status

21. Google Docs:
DocumentsList
API via Zend,
with 2 Legged
OAuth

22. Time for a REST
GET
/feeds/documents/private/full?xoauth_requestor_id=f.j.bloggs-
08%40student.lboro.ac.uk HTTP/1.1
Host: docs.google.com
Connection: close
User-Agent: Lboro.ac.uk-My-2.1 Zend_Framework_Gdata/1.11.1
Accept-encoding: identity
Authorization: Oauth realm=”X", oauth_consumer_key=”Y",
oauth_nonce=”Z", oauth_signature_method="HMAC-SHA1",
oauth_timestamp="1323821672", oauth_version="1.0",
oauth_signature="4hfRnByN%2F2DZya8t797CQqPmCTg%3D”

23. 'requestScheme' => Zend_Oauth::REQUEST_SCHEME_HEADER,
'version' => '1.0’, 'signatureMethod' => 'HMAC-SHA1',
'consumerKey' => ‘XXX’, 'consumerSecret' => ‘YYY’
);
$config = new Zend_Oauth_Consumer($options);
$token = new Zend_Oauth_Token_Access();
$httpClient = $token->getHttpClient($options);
$client = new Zend_Gdata_Docs($httpClient);
$feed = $client-
>getDocumentListFeed('https://docs.google.com/feeds/documents/priv
ate/full?xoauth_requestor_id=' . urlencode($email_address));
foreach ($feed->entries as $entry) {
$title = $entry->title; $href = $link->getHref();
print "<li><a target='_gdocs' href='$href'>$title</a></li>n";
}

24. <entry>
<id>https://docs.google.com/feeds/documents/private/full/spreadsheet%3A0AtfqxZt
971TSdFFvQlRTZ3ZpRkVyYkZERnVxclZMMXc</id>
<published>2010-05-25T14:53:42.396Z</published>
<updated>2010-05-25T15:02:10.470Z</updated>
<category scheme='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005/labels'
term='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005/labels#viewed'
label='viewed'/>
<category scheme='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind'
term='http://schemas.google.com/docs/2007#spreadsheet'
label='spreadsheet'/>
<title type='text'>Single Sign-On target services</title>
<content type='text/html’
src='https://docs.google.com/feeds/download/spreadsheets/Export?key=0AtfqxZt971
TSdFFvQlRTZ3ZpRkVyYkZERnVxclZMMXc&amp;xoauth_requestor_id=f.j.bloggs-
08@student.lboro.ac.uk'/>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html'
href='https://docs.google.com/a/student.lboro.ac.uk/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AtfqxZt9
71TSdFFvQlRTZ3VpRkVyYkZERnVxclZMMXc&amp;hl=en_US'/>
<link rel='http://schemas.google.com/spreadsheets/2006#worksheetsfeed’
type='application/atom+xml’
href='https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/worksheets/0AtfqxZt971TSdFFvQlRTZ3Z

25. <link
rel='edit-media' type='text/html'
href='https://docs.google.com/feeds/media/private/full/spreadsheet%3A0AtfqxZt971
TSdFFvQlRTZ3ZpRkVyYkZERnVxclZMMXc/gtg9ff6k?xoauth_requestor_id=f.j.bloggs-
08@student.lboro.ac.uk'/>
<author>
<name>f.j.bloggs-08</name>
<email>f.j.bloggs-08@student.lboro.ac.uk</email>
</author>
<gd:resourceId>
spreadsheet:0AtfqxZt971TSdFFvQlRTZ3VpRkVyYkZERnVxclZMMXc
</gd:resourceId>
<gd:lastModifiedBy>
<name>f.j.bloggs-08</name>
<email>f.j.bloggs-08@student.lboro.ac.uk</email>
</gd:lastModifiedBy>
<gd:lastViewed>2011-10-06T21:29:56.187Z</gd:lastViewed>
<gd:quotaBytesUsed>0</gd:quotaBytesUsed>
<docs:writersCanInvite value='true'/>
</entry>

26. Gmail:
Zend Library
with
2 Legged OAuth

27. Google
Calendar:
Zend
Library with
2 Legged
OAuth

28. Learn widget:
MySQL connection
to underlying
Moodle software
Exported view of
Underlying Student
Information System

29. Budget widget:
• MS SQL (ODBC) connection
• Card vendor Web Services API
• Home grown Library API

30. Putting It Together

32. Putting It Together
Visiting http://my.lboro.ac.uk:
– Shibboleth prompts for SSO login if necessary
• SAML response includes LDAP attributes from
Active Directory, e.g. student ID
– Populates skeleton HTML of page
• Starts AJAX callbacks going to render widgets
• Choice of staff/student content
– Appearance driven via CSS + jQuery

33. Traps for the Unwary
• Are you using UTF-8 everywhere?
• SimpleXMLElement barfs on malformed XML
• How much intermediate caching to do?
• Do you even have APIs??
• 2 Legged OAuth not well understood
• REST good, SOAP bad – but use JSON rather
than XML if you can
• print_r() and Data::Dumper are your friends!

34. Closing Thoughts

36. CMIS / Google Calendar

37. Add mobile
Version here

39. The Future is Here:
It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed
Martin Hamilton
http://martinh.net
@martin_hamilton
Photo by Sarath Sreekumar via Flickr