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January 28, 2007
First Technology Update
I've been putting off blogging about the technology aspect of our project for some time, but I made a breakthrough today worthy of sharing with the world.
Today I finally linked up enough modules so that people who swipe in with a card can have their facebook profile picture appear on screen. (not an amazing accomplishment if that was the entire goal, but it demonstrates that the pieces of the architecture are falling into place.) This is how the system currently works:
Announce (handles CardSwipes) --> DB(Store session start, expiration, and last update)
Updater --> DB (Poll all active users) --> Updater (Run Collectors to collect information about each user (including facebook profile, LDAP information ,etc)) --> Updater (Store this information in the DB)
And here is where it gets fun.
Controller (XML-RPC web server that listens for RPCs)
Client --> Calls Controller (get_active_users) --> Controller returns active users
Client --> Calls Controller (get_user_info(user) )
So essentially, right now anyone can query user_info and active_users using simple XML-RPC calls. I have written example clients in Python, Javascript (AJAX), RUBY, and PERL. This will make it easy for user created modules to interface with the information stored in the database in the future.
My example application uses Javascript XML-RPC to interface with the XML-RPC server (Ruby's WeBrick), and display the facebook pictures of active users.
Posted by bcx at January 28, 2007 01:24 AM