Fwd: [schooltool-dev] Configuration issues for schools

[Tim Holy]

An off-list reply, posted here for general information. Joshua and I are
exploring the merits of this approach in comparison to other suggestions and
its possible generalization to multiple projects.

Currently I'm favoring an approach similar to that suggested by David Groos,
where we might support two implementations, a "less secure/easier to
install" and "more secure" version. Perhaps the clients (the individual
apps) could use a library that would provide an API independent of the
server architecture.

--Tim

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Joshua Higgins <joshiggins at googlemail.com>
Date: Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 12:29 PM
Subject: Re: [schooltool-dev] Configuration issues for schools
To: Tim Holy <tim.holy at gmail.com>


Hello Tim,

I'm currently building a system to store pupil data for a school, and have
gone for the filesystem-based backend approach, using a folder for each
user.

The difference is that my users don't have access to this folder. Instead,
the appplication that needs the data sends a read request to a server
application (using UDP) which does have access, which then finds it and
sends it back. When the program is ready to save the data, it sends a write
request, containing the data to be saved, back to the server.

This may seem a little overkill, but works far better when, like you said,
all the kids log in with a password-less "student" account, because 1) they
can't access to change this data and 2) there needn't be shared directories
or a complete LDAP or SSO network for it to work, just a network connected
machine running the UDP server app. For small classroom networks the server
could even be built into the teacher admin program.

I currently have this implemented in Gambas, but probably wouldn't be
suitable since it pulls in a huge amount of qt and gtk dependencies.


-- 
joshua higgins
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