Re: Zimlets anyone

[Steve Hillman <hillman@sfu.ca>]

I was hoping that our site's talented developers would take the bait, but no such luck.

Since collaboration on Zimlet development was one of my core goals for setting up this list, I can't let this opportunity go by, so I'll do my best to summarize what we've done so far. Further questions to the list will hopefully inspire our developers to speak up :)

Our first objective in Zimlet development was to integrate existing functionality that we had in our legacy portal, in the hopes of eventually eliminating the portal as a standalone app. The second objective was to add new functionality to the system - "carrots" that would persuade traditional desktop users that the web client was really the place to be.

The first objective has largely been met. We have a "mySFU" zimlet, which, when clicked on, opens a new window that encompasses the functionality we had in the portal. It is, in effect, just another view into the same portal. Eventually, we want to more tightly integrate it though, so that instead of opening in a new window, it'll open in the main viewer, the way the Yahoo Local zimlet does. That will probably also allow it to integrate into other zimlets, such as the date & phone hovers.  But as a freebee, the current zimlet also recognizes course names and ISBN course book numbers in email messages. If you hover over either, you'll get details on the course/book. Our existing portal already had all of this info, so it was just a matter of making it accessible via AJAX.

In terms of new functionality, I've just seen a demo of a new Zimlet we've developed that I'm really excited to see go live. It's a "tip of the day/emergency alerts" Zimlet. At login, it uses AJAX to talk back to an independent REST server to grab new "tips" that we place there, but it'll also wake up every few minutes and check the same server for any emergency alerts. The user can turn off the display of new tips, but not the alerts. Our university is located on a small mountain, so it's not unusual to have one or two snow closures in the winter. I doubt it'll be long before we get to try the alerts out :)

Our developers are wedded to Apple's WebObjects development environment, so all of our back-end services are written in that, rather than suffer the pain of trying to develop apps in JSP. Still, I don't think it would be hard for another site to take the REST back-end service for the tips/alerts and port it to whatever dev environment you use.

A few other zimlet ideas we have, but haven't gotten to yet:
 - SFU Phone directory integration -  recognize an SFU phone number in an email, and when you hover over it, pull up the contact details 
 - Calendar integration - we're still not sure whether this belongs in a Zimlet under user control, or done automatically on the back-end when users enroll in courses, but the vision is to populate calendars with any course info we have for courses they're enrolled in, and encourage faculty to keep it up to date with midterm dates, etc. 

We also have numerous other services available to faculty and students - Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts, for example, that we'll be giving thought to how to integrate into Zimbra..

----- "Pamela K Buffington" <pam.buffington@oit.gatech.edu> wrote:

> If you've developed a zimlet, is there anyway you could share with the
> list and list what your zimlet does? There were some great Zimlets
> demoed at Educause and I'd really like to get those (if possible) and
> see what other people have developed.
> 
> Thanks
> pam

-- 
Steve Hillman                                IT Architect
hillman@sfu.ca                               IT Infrastructure
778-782-3960                                 Simon Fraser University