[Building Sakai] News Tool Picker

[Matthew Buckett]

As part of a small project to promote content we're looking at
providing a picker for URLs for the News Tool. The idea is that when
someone is adding a news tool to  their site they have the ability to
pick from an pre-populated list as well as entering the URL.

To build this list (<500 items) we are looking at having a small bit
of JavaScript/HTML to display the list and allow the user to select
the item (RSS feed URL). The data to build the list will be loaded
asynchronously. The source data providing the list of RSS feeds is
formatted in RSS or OMPL and is hosted on another server (different
domain) so to load it into a page in Sakai we have some options to get
around cross domain requests:

- Provide a small proxy which sites inside Sakai to allow the RSS/OPML
to be served up from the domain of our sakai server, and then parse it
in JavaScript.
- Have a more complex proxy inside Sakai which transforms the RSS/OMPL
into JSON(?).
- Enhance the source system so it outputs JSONP which allows us to get
around the cross domain request issue.

Is there any interest in this picker feature in the Sakai community
and if so which solution would you be interested in for loading the
source data.

-- 
  Matthew Buckett
  VLE Developer, LTG, Oxford University Computing Services