[Building Sakai] Gradebook WS for Maximum Cloud Intensity... ( or at least a moderately functional Cumulonimbus)

[Steven Githens]

Hi Dev,

I'm curious what the current status of Web Services are for the 
Gradebook/EDUServices.  I've seen the occasional GradebookWS.jws that 
floats around, but I'm curious what else there is.

I'm asking in particular because iParadigms may want to connect to it in 
order to do some Grademark integration, similar to what they have with 
other course management systems.  In some situations they have had to 
build the endpoints themselves, and in some situations they could use an 
endpoint already included in the CMS.  I'm hoping that we have 
something, or could easily have something that would be available for 
these integrations, that you could just hand a vendor.

Whether they log in with a single shared secret, or some special admin 
account, or under the individual user ID's or some other mechanism is up 
for debate, and is different for the endpoints exposed by different 
CMS's.  I realize there are the standard hodge podge of provisioning 
questions that go along with this.

The take home message is: Do we have an endpoint robust enough like this 
that the signatures could be handed to a vendor in order for them to 
integrate with some external cloud service that will eventually push 
grades back to the Gradebook.  And has anyone done this, without 
requiring supplying a ton of patches back to be ran on the Sakai Server.

Cheers,
STeve