On the ROA

The iPhone application uses Student Web Service V4 to power the course module. The app takes advantage of our new course search api, course description, and a new set of academic resources which are all publicly available. Here is the V4 documentation.

Read more on the Office of the University Registrar Blog and the UW Facebook page .

Another V4 feature we added SWS is the ability to submit a search query against course titles. You can now create your own application search feature for your users.

The below web request performs a course search using “info” as the contains search text against course titles. This returns 216 search results showing only 10 results at a time.

https://ws.admin.washington.edu/student/v4/public/course?year=&quarter=&curriculum_abbreviation=&course_number=&course_title_starts=&course_title_contains=info&sort_by=on&page_size=10

Lastly, we also offer paging so you can receive the total result count, page size, and page start to help you enable paging in your application.

Enjoy!

On August 3rd we released a new version of SWS.

This release still supports v3, and adds version 4 which introduces Campus, College, Department, and Curriculum search capabilities, as well as an update to Course search, and Section.

Click here for documentation.

Course descriptions have been an elusive piece of data for many developers at the UW for some time now. Some developers resorted to screen scraping the UW time schedule, a set of html pages, to get access to the data however those days are behind us now. Course description is now available in the Student Web Service with our most recent V4 release.

Here is an example: https://ws.admin.washington.edu/student/v4/public/course/2009,summer,CSE,100

We are still looking at the possibility of delivering Instructor Submitted Course Descriptions.

Happy programming!

The Idcard Photo service has a new client! 

Photos are now available in the Electronic Academic Records System (EARS).  This means that advisors and administrators who are working with students can see photos along with academic records.   

The advisers are thrilled and, according to Patricia Greer of the Student Team, calling the photo service from her application was easy.

Other Clients Coming on Board Soon

The College of Education is in the process of adding photos to the STEP advisors application and Catalyst Tools will soon be adding photos to GoPost.

 Interested in Getting Access?

The registrar’s office has determined that access to the photos will be governed by the same Memorandum of Understanding that covers access to the Student Web Service data.  If you have signed the MOU, contact Matt Winslow to get your application’s certificate authorized.

New Version Coming Soon

A new version that will allow clients to request custom sizes is in the works and will be released soon.

A few students (Braxton Ehle, Chris Zrout, and William Briere) from the iSchool has created a cool new iPhone web application using the student web services as part of their course work.

You can access the application here http://myuw.info

The students contacted the SWS team while working on their project to programmatically access public UW course data in a fast and easy way. When they completed their project we were happy to see such fast and creative innovation built on top of the SWS.

Here is the list of features from their own words.

Search for and view information on classes

Add classes to your “schedule”

Map your classes in Google Maps

View the UW RSS News feed

“It’s designed around webkit and safari in mind, so it’s best viewed in either safari or an iPod Touch or iPhone.”

Braxton, Chris, and William plan on finalizing their project and adding more features in the near future to help UW students – get mobile! I also heard from their instructor that they did a “great job” with the app and liked how they tailored the project to help solve a practical need.

Good work!

R25 is the UW’s general assignment classroom scheduling database owned by the Office of the Registrar. My team and I have been working with the owners of the data to understand use cases for providing a web service on top of the R25 database. If we were able to provide this data over a web service we could easily imagine a quick and valuable web client that shows classroom scheduling information containing information like free/busy, room capacity, room equipment, and other data. This could really help classroom schedulers on campus and many others. We could also imagine integration with other space data around campus such as SIMS (space inventory management system).

Currently access to the R25 database is limited to those with the R25 windows desktop client only. Do you have a use case for R25 and space data that your department or business unit could take advantage of via a web service? If so we would like to hear from you. Just add a comment to this blog entry or send me email (ttchang@washington.edu).

SWS V3 is now available on our production web server and we plan on deprecating V2 within the next couple of weeks. Since Catalyst is our only client using our V2 production web service we are expecting little to no impact to anyone else.

SWS client docs are available here. Below is a quick summary of V3:

SWS V3 Public Resources
We now have public APIs which require no client authentication. The resources have been designed with the Office of the Registrar to ensure that the data is safe for public consumption. The following public resources are available:

• Course
• Course Search
• Section
• Section Search
• Term

The public resource can be accessed like in these examples below.

Section: https://ws.admin.washington.edu/student/v3/public/course/2009,summer,info,344/A

Section Search: https://ws.admin.washington.edu/student/v3/public/section?year=2009&quarter=summer&curriculum_abbreviation=info&course_number=344_id=

NOTE: Due to network configurations, http://ws.admin.washington.edu, is currently unavailable outside the UW network. This is currently being addressed and we plan on having our end point available outside of the UW network shortly after 6/15.

SWS V3 Updated Resources
The resources below have been updated including a new attribute to the section resource called the Class Website Url.

• Course
• Section
• Registration

Please continue to log and vote for feature requests on UserVoice. Please subscribe to mailman list (http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/sws-client-app-dev) for future notification of production changes to SWS.

For anyone with a Web Service, or anyone who wants to consume a Web Service, I have some exciting news. At the end of March, Miles Crawford sent out an email to the Appdev list soliciting help building a registry for such items. I’m happy to announce not only did he get a response, there is actually some tangible code.

The original desire was “…a technical tool to help identify and locate resources, but also as an outreach tool to better connect the groups behind services.”  To anyone who has tried to obtain data from anywhere around campus the need is certainly apparent.  Even though there is a trend to create Web Services and offer data, as before, finding out what data is available and tracking down who has it is a huge problem.

In the spirit of openness and the chance to work with new people and technologies the following team was born:

    Miles Crawford – Learning & Scholarly Technologies
    Tony Chang – Office of Information Management
    Chris Heiland – UW Marketing

We knew we needed a framework, source control, and a server.  The last part was the easiest to decide, Catalyst was kind enough to allow us a temporary home on one of its servers.  Since we had near-complete freedom on the choice of technology we spent a bit of time deciding on the technology needed to implement the service.

I want to stress strongly that our choice in frameworks, languages or source control is not going to be the best choice for every job.  Yes, there are numerous other options and they all have their pros and cons.  The goal for the technology was to support rapid development and a short learning curve, none of us wanted to spend the entire project lost in a manual.

The project was a temporary solution to a current problem, but the solution had to last from several months to longer.  Thus we were not looking for something that would scale to an enterprise deployment (thousands of services, millions of hits, constantly changing data), but if there was the ability to handle the load then we wouldn’t turn it down.

We decided to use Python as our language and Django as our framework.  The framework is fast to deploy and certainly excels at CRUD-style applications.  If this does become the permanent solution then we certainly have the option of leaving the registry as a Django app.  A bit more caching in a few places and no more pilot status.

For source control we did not require an elaborate solution, any system could handle what we needed.  Also, as we saw this as a chance to stretch a bit we decided to look at Distributed Version Control, specifically Git.  Git may not be worthy of all the hype, but there are some very clear advantages versus systems like SVN or CVS.

Again, there is no perfect tool for every job, we could have easily set up Subversion and been done with it.  However this was a chance to learn a new tool.  There was also the opportunity to host our code at GitHub, which had space and fell under the ‘nifty’ factor.

After a few short meetings of discussing what features to include and adding some  more to the Scope Creep Bin, we started coding.  In a short amount of time we had a working application and the ability to quickly manipulate test data using the built-in admin interface.

There is still a bit more work to do before the application is released, but we are very happy with the progress.  Very little code is needed to put together something functional and the framework is very straight forward.  Overall we are excited and preparing for launch.  Until then you know how to reach us.