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 <div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Joshua Higgins <<a href="mailto:joshiggins@googlemail.com">joshiggins@googlemail.com</a>> Date: Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 12:29 PM Subject: Re: [schooltool-dev] Configuration issues for schools To: Tim Holy <<a href="mailto:tim.holy@gmail.com">tim.holy@gmail.com</a>> 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 >>>>>>------ </div>