Office of the University Registrar

UW students with iPhones or other mobile devices can now search for available classes, locate them on campus, and catch up on the latest University news from a single interface. This functionality is now available thanks to the initiative of a group of Informatics students and the flexibility and availability of the Student Web Services (SWS).

Home screen for Mobile MyUW

Mobile MyUW, as the experimental web application is named, is not an official version of the University’s MyUW information portal. It’s the final project for Informatics 344, “Web Tools and Development,” created by undergraduate students Braxton Ehle, Chris Zrout, and William Briere. Their project was to create a mobile-optimized version of MyUW functionality (it’s best viewed in a mobile browser) and they turned to the Office of Information Management (OIM) to leverage the SWS.

“We were happy to see such fast and creative innovation built on top of the SWS,” OIM’s Tony Chang wrote on the Resource Oriented Archicture blog, On the ROA. This sort of experimentation with public data is one of the primary reasons the University is investing in web services.

The web application requires a log-in (managed by the web application itself; it does not authenticate users via UW NetID), and offers users three main features:

1. Classes – Search for classes to add to your schedule (leverages the “course” web service).
2. Class location – Pinpoint your classes on a Google Map of campus, including a handy “Find today’s classes” link showing you where need to be throughout the day.
3. UW News – The latest headlines from the UW’s RSS news feed.

According to Chang, the three students plan to continue to refine the proof-of-concept web application and add features. It’s exciting to see useful applications for the UW community so soon after the release of the SWS. It’s especially interesting to see the “mashup” of data services: SWS and the Google Maps API.

The web application earned the group respect among the UW developer community—as well as a good grade.