A read-only API for P2PU

I've been part of the P2PU community for a good while now, and have organised a couple of groups within their platform so I thought it was about time to give back. On top of that, they use Python and Django, two pieces of technology that up to a month ago or so were completely unknown to me and I have always wanted to learn. Not that  I know all that much about them right now, but there's nothing better for learning than using the tools in a real context and within a real project, so that is exactly what I've been doing for the last couple of weeks. #opensource_ftw!

After an initial proof of concept using tastypie, as recommended by the chaps in the python.ie mailing list, I have started to work on it a bit more seriously and it will hopefully soon enough be reviewed and merged with the main Lernanta codebase. My fork of Lernanta has an API branch where you can find all the code to date.


And you might be wondering... why am I telling you all this? Because I could do with some help! If you want to learn not only Python and Django but aslo about RESTful architecture and web services do not hesitate in joining me.

Illustration by @alisonjeancole

You can also have a look at the blog post in the main P2PU blog.

Connecting Open Wonderland to external services

I've been working on a tutorial about how to connect Wonderland to (and from) services on the Internet (webservices).

I am a big fan of REST so that's what I chose for the first tutorial that can be found in the community wiki.
The  code for the module can be found in my github account: REST sample module, and this is a screencast showing what you can expect from the module:



As per the utility of this module, as it stands it is quite limited, but what I am trying to show here is that it is very simple to connect to external sources, and in the same way that this very simple module sends information to be stored in an external database, other REST communication could be as easily programmed, be it integration with services such as twitter or facebook, or learning management systems such as moodle or sakai.

You can see some similar examples by Bernard Horan in Wonderblog and his youtube channel.

Client communication is not the only way that Open Wonderland can communicate with external services and I have started documenting this topic in this page. Please feel free to contribute; help will be much appreciated.