Moodbile, a Moodle web services extension and mobile apps

1st Moodle Research Conference 2012

Moodbile: a Moodle web services extension for mobile applications

Jordi Piguillem, Marc Alier, María José Casany, Enric Mayol, Nikolas Galanis, Franciso J. García-Peñalvo, Miguel

Ángel Conde

1st Moodle Research Conference 2012

Motivation

Accessibility of internet-enabled mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, ultrabooks, etc.)

Moodle UI not optimized for small touch screens

Increasing percentage of accesses of Atenea (UPC Moodle server) done via mobile devices

1st Moodle Research Conference 2012

Motivation

Atenea: UPC’s Moodle based digital platform

Some access numbers for the first 6 months of 2011 (Casany et al. 2012): Total number of logged actions: ~15M Actions from mobile devices: 3,76% % of actions from PCs that are logins: 30,41% % of actions from mobile devices that are logins: 49,51%

1st Moodle Research Conference 2012

Issues

Moodle 2.0 shipped with Web Services Architecture

Provided web services are mostly geared towards:

– Bulk Operations– Administration

We need web services for accessing:– Activity modules– Contents– Language strings– Messages– Capabilities

1st Moodle Research Conference 2012

Moodle Web Services Architecture

Adds two logical layers to Moodle’s architecture

1. Moodle External API Layer

2. Web Services Connector Layer

1st Moodle Research Conference 2012

Moodbile

Design an extension to Moodle Web Services Architecture that provides access to the most suitable features for mobile applications

Features identified using two sources (Casany et al. 2012):

1. Atenea’s web server logs

2. Atenea’s Moodle logs

1st Moodle Research Conference 2012

Moodbile Architecture

1st Moodle Research Conference 2012

External API Layer

Implementation of the services for mobile integration Basic Services

– Course, User, Groups

Course Content Services– Assignment, Forum, Resource, Quiz

Personal Content Services– Blog, Calendar, Grade, Message

System Services– Lang, System

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External Functions Implementation

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Implementation of a class

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WS Connectors Layer

Provides additional web service protocols• JSON (AJAX with JSON format messages)• JSONP• JSON-RPC• JSON-RPC with OAuth• REST with OAuth

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Connector Architecture

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Authentication

In a mobile environment, security issues are critical

IP filtering is not possible for mobile devices OAuth as an alternative to username/password

and token methods Choice of protocol and authentication left to the

various clients.• HTML5: JSON-AJAX• Android: JSON-RPC, JSON-RPC/OAuth• iOS: Rest/OAuth

1st Moodle Research Conference 2012

Moodbile Clients

HTML5 Android iOS

1st Moodle Research Conference 2012

Some Useful Links

Moodbile web:

http://www.moodbile.org/

Moodbile documentation:

http://docs.moodbile.org/

Moodbile Web Services Documentation:

http://docs.moodbile.org/index.php?title=Moodbile_WS_Latest_Version_Documentation