Why EduRuby?

[Aaron Sumner]

Hi, my name is Aaron Sumner. I started the EduRuby group to try to connect with other Rubyists working in education at any level, in any capacity. Since Google Groups have done away with a welcome message, I figured I'd type one up as a first post to EduRuby.

A little background: My developers and I use Ruby and Rails to create web applications at the University of Kansas. We're not in central IT, or in an academic department, so much of our work is done under the radar--in fact, most of our day-to-day usage comes from people not only outside the university, but from people who may not even know or care that we're university-affiliated.

As far as I know, we're the only shop at KU actively doing Rails development, and I don't know if or how other departments are using Ruby. Given the growing popularity of both Ruby and Rails, however, I have to think there are people at other universities, or at K-12 campuses, using Ruby for web development, system administration/automation, data manipulation, or desktop software development--or maybe even teaching computer science through Ruby.

I'm also curious if some of the issues we face at KU, be they lack of support for Ruby from central IT or (perceived) bias against the language itself (most of central IT's work is done in PHP or Java). Do Ruby developers at other schools face similar problems? Other problems? What do they do to overcome these issues? Are there must-attend conferences, projects, books, etc. for Ruby-minded educators?

If you're working with Ruby in any capacity at a K-12 school or institute of higher education (or other school-type place), I hope you'll join EduRuby to discuss these issues, share ideas, or get feedback from others. Whether your use of Ruby falls under system administration, academics, instruction, data manipulation, or web/software development, we're happy to have you join. And if you have any thoughts on ways to make this group more useful for educational uses of Ruby, please pass them along.

Thanks,
Aaron

[Karmen Blake]

this is great! looking forward to interacting. :)

Karmen

[bowser_senior]

Hi, my name is Mani and I work as a ruby developer at Cal. State Univ.
Northridge. Our experience with ruby here mirrors what Aaron has
described very, very closely.

I think there's lots of potential for ruby in higher education. There
are lots of challenges, but it's great to have an organized community
of ruby developers working in education.

Thanks for organizing EduRuby. I look forward to participating.

Mani Tadayon
Ruby on Rails Developer
Student Affairs I.T.
California State University, Northridge

[Brian Hogan]

Hi everyone!

I'm Brian Hogan. By night I hack on Ruby code and edit books for
PragProg, but by day I work for the University of Wisconsin-Eau
Claire, where I and my student interns develop web apps for campus
using Ruby on Rails, and we actually are a part of campus IT. After
successfully migrating several applications from ASP and PHP, and
deploying our first Rails applications on a Windows server, we've
gained a lot more support in our organization for what we do.

I've been looking like a group like this for some time, as an older
group I used to belong to has gone silent. I'm very excited to share
ideas, concepts, and methodoligies with others, and I'm sure there's a
lot of cool stuff I can learn as well.

[Gregory Brown]

On Feb 1, 2:24 pm, Aaron Sumner <asum...@mac.com> wrote:
> Hi, my name is Aaron Sumner. I started the EduRuby group to try to connect with other Rubyists working in education at any level, in any capacity.

Hi Aaron, great idea!

I'm Gregory Brown, founder of Ruby Mendicant University. RMU is a
free online school for intermediate software developers with a heavy
focus on mentoring and producing new free software projects. We're in
our second trimester, and currently seeking non-profit status for a
more general organization that would promote a wide range of
alternative education ideas.

For the time being I'm working on this full time. We're working on
grassroots ways to fund ourselves, and if they succeed, we plan to
continue to grow gradually as our resources allow. Two things we're
producing that might be interesting to Ruby educators in general: our
exercises and our classroom administration software.

http://university.rubymendicant.com/resources/core_projects.html
http://university.rubymendicant.com/resources/learning_materials.html

I'm excited to see what happens on this list, and I invite folks
interested in RMU to either ask me some questions here, or check out
the #rmu IRC channel on Freenode, I'm seacreature there.

-greg

[Michael McDermott]

I work at Brown University in Rhode Island.  I've done some Rails projects, in particular build a faculty salary increase process and a pilot of an online faculty appointments database.  In my current capacity, I'm leading up our identity management effort and looking for ways to use ruby to make our code base simpler.  I've a ruby script that monitors our LDAP for changes and kicks off processes and we're rolling out the automated provisioning of our course groups to google using Jruby and Apache ActiveMQ.  

Brown is doing some work with using Rails as a front end web tier and exploring how to integrate with the Kuali Rice framework for workflow.  I'm not on that team, so I can't report on it's progress, but I know people are interested in seeing how it might work.

Many universities use the Shibboleth SAML implementation for Web Single Sign ON., and while I have a basic set of code that uses Authlogic to pull Apache attributes set by the Shibboleth, I'm looking to bundle that up into a gem in the coming months.

[Aaron Sumner]

Hi Michael,

I've been getting interested in Shibboleth integration myself of late--our campus uses it, but our Rails apps to date have not been for the university audience. I've been thinking about how it might work with OmniAuth, though I haven't looked seriously at either it or Shibboleth to see if that's feasible. This would definitely be worth a thread down the road, though.

Aaron

[Michael McDermott]

Aaron,

I'll try to write something up over the next week or so, but Shibboleth integrates with Apache as sort of a filter.  It intercepts requests and forces an authentication and then lets the request pass through to the protected resource.  It sets some environmental values that are attributes of the user's identity provided by the Identity Provider (where you logon), frequently, Shibboleth will set the REMOTE_USER attribute.

From there it is merely a matter of reading those values and using them to make authorization decisions.

It isn't hard to implement in any authentication schema.  I was also looking at Omni Auth because I'm interested in how to setup a SAML binding there.  Shibboleth relies on Apache, a good ruby SAML implementation would remove that requirement.  Unfortunately it is not trivial to implement SAML properly.  Shibboleth has a big leg up because members of the development team are/were at the forefront of creating the SAML specs.

In general, I don't mind the apache dependency as we're using Passenger to serve all our apps.  It's been pretty handy to externalize authentication, as a developer, I just don't have to think about it (as the university's shibboleth admin, I do need to pay attention a bit).

Mike

[bowser_senior]

RMU is a great idea and it's obvious you've put a lot of work into it.
Hope admissions opens up again soon...

-Mani

On Feb 6, 7:01 am, Gregory Brown <gregory.t.br...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 1, 2:24 pm, Aaron Sumner <asum...@mac.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi, my name is Aaron Sumner. I started the EduRuby group to try to connect with other Rubyists working in education at any level, in any capacity.
>
> Hi Aaron, great idea!
>
> I'm Gregory Brown, founder of Ruby Mendicant University.  RMU is a
> free online school for intermediate software developers with a heavy
> focus on mentoring and producing new free software projects. We're in
> our second trimester, and currently seeking non-profit status for a
> more general organization that would promote a wide range of
> alternative education ideas.
>
> For the time being I'm working on this full time. We're working on
> grassroots ways to fund ourselves, and if they succeed, we plan to
> continue to grow gradually as our resources allow. Two things we're
> producing that might be interesting to Ruby educators in general: our
> exercises and our classroom administration software.
>

> http://university.rubymendicant.com/resources/core_projects.htmlhttp://university.rubymendicant.com/resources/learning_materials.html

[Toyokazu]

Hi all,

My name is Toyokazu Akiyama, from Kyoto Sangyo University, Japan.
Our university joins Japanese Shibboleth federation (Gakunin) and I am
also interested in integrating OmniAuth with Shibboleth.

Recently I have implemented a prototype Shibboleth strategy on to the
original omniauth (oa_enterprise).

https://github.com/toyokazu/omniauth
Please read the following document.
https://github.com/toyokazu/omniauth/blob/master/oa-enterprise/README.rdoc

and a simple example application with Shibboleth strategy (sorry it
includes Japanese messeges.. ;().

https://github.com/toyokazu/presence_checker
How to use omniauth shibboleth strategy is written in the
README.markdown
https://github.com/toyokazu/presence_checker/blob/master/README.markdown

If you like Shibboleth strategy, I would like to ask the possibility
of the feedback to the original omniauth :)

Regards,
--
Toyokazu Akiyama

On 2月9日, 午前10:44, Aaron Sumner <asum...@mac.com> wrote:
> Hi Michael,
>

> I've been getting interested inShibbolethintegration myself of late--our campus uses it, but our Rails apps to date have not been for the university audience. I've been thinking about how it might work with OmniAuth, though I haven't looked seriously at either it orShibbolethto see if that's feasible. This would definitely be worth a thread down the road, though.

>
> Aaron
>
> On Feb 6, 2011, at 12:06 PM, Michael McDermott wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > I work at Brown University in Rhode Island.  I've done some Rails projects, in particular build a faculty salary increase process and a pilot of an online faculty appointments database.  In my current capacity, I'm leading up our identity management effort and looking for ways to use ruby to make our code base simpler.  I've a ruby script that monitors our LDAP for changes and kicks off processes and we're rolling out the automated provisioning of our course groups to google using Jruby and Apache ActiveMQ.  
>
> > Brown is doing some work with using Rails as a front end web tier and exploring how to integrate with the Kuali Rice framework for workflow.  I'm not on that team, so I can't report on it's progress, but I know people are interested in seeing how it might work.
>

> > Many universities use theShibbolethSAML implementation for Web Single Sign ON., and while I have a basic set of code that uses Authlogic to pull Apache attributes set by theShibboleth, I'm looking to bundle that up into a gem in the coming months.

[Aaron Sumner]

Thanks very much for sharing this, I will check it out in the next few days. I have an upcoming need for Shibboleth integration in a Rails application.

Aaron

[Toyokazu Akiyama]

Thank you for your response!

OmniAuth (Shibboleth strategy) just copy Shibboleth's environment
variables to OmniAuth's ones.

e.g.
request.env["eppn"] = uid_xxx
...
=>
request.env["omniauth.auth"] = {:uid => uid_xxx, :extra => {...}}

It does almost nothing :).

I think that the merit to implement with OmniAuth, that is adapting
omniauth style implementation using /auth/:provider/callback path,
helps to share authentication implementation know-hows like Railscasts
examples.

Railscasts: Using multiple authentication method per user example
http://railscasts.com/episodes/235-omniauth-part-1
http://railscasts.com/episodes/236-omniauth-part-2

It's an interesting example. We can use CAS, OpenID and Shibboleth together :)

While in this example, Ryan implement callback routines or several
other things by himself, current version Devise (standard
authentication framework in Rails 3) seems to support omniauth
(:omniauthable) and ease the implementation.
# though I've not tested yet...;)

Understanding OmniAuth itself, the following railscasts helps me very much.
If you do not have much time to dig in, I recommend you to view it in
a train by your smart phone :)

http://railscasts.com/episodes/241-simple-omniauth

OmniAuth just provides request.env["omniauth.auth"] environment
variables. The rest of things like a session management should be
implemented by yourself. Referring railscasts or using Devise may be
an easy way.

Bests,
--
Toyokazu Akiyama

2011/4/8 Aaron Sumner <asu...@mac.com>:

--
Toyokazu AKIYAMA
Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering,
Kyoto Sangyo University
TEL/FAX: +81-75-705-1531

[Turadg Aleahmad]

Toyokazu, thanks for sharing this. I'm hoping that my university moves to Shibboleth soon.

Right now they use Pubcookie. For anyone needing Pubcookie SSO, a student here has written an Omniauth strategy:

  https://github.com/alexcrichton/oa-pubcookie

Turadg

[Toyokazu Akiyama]

Hi,

Thank you for sharing, too.

I do not know well about Pubcookie but It seems to do many things than mine :)
I think providing much more kind of strategies will help people to
migrate the other preferable SSO mechanism.

Good job :)

Bests,
--
Toyokazu AKIYAMA

2011/4/9 Turadg Aleahmad <tur...@gmail.com>: