He o… Daniel Reedy Assistant Manager of Information Technology University Housing, Southern Illinois University Carbondale Server Administration Web Development Security Policies & Audits PCI Compliance General Tech Support
StarRez H tor RFP Process 2003 StarRez Conversion Spring 2010 StarCom Install Fall 2003 Went Live & First Check-out Spring 2004 Maintenance Module Fall 2008 First Move-in with StarRez Fall 2010 Live with StarAppWeb for Contracts Fall 2004
Po er to t e Stu e t Elevate the student’s involvement in the process Empower them to directly influence their life on campus Eliminate uncertainty in contracting and room selection (With Luck) Increase their satisfaction with their housing …We found a few shortcomings though…
StarRez API REST Web Services and Reporting API Eliminated the need for direct access to the database Provided appropriate sanity checks Exposed relationships between tables Decreased the amount of code maintenance
REST Arc tecture REpresentational State Transfer (REST) Establishes a “language” used to communicate with a service Resources are nouns and have a URI Uses HTTP methods as the verbs: GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE Allows us to perform the core database functions (CRUD)
Exa e: E erge c Co tact StarRez REST Ser ce Ca u F re a I ter et Stu e t La to Web Ser er https://{server}/services/Update/EntryAddress/123? ContactName=John%20Doe
StarRez & Rub o Ra Ruby on Rails: Open Source Project Object-Oriented Web Framework Convention over Configuration Metaprogramming Features REST is completely integrated
StarRez o Ra API Wra er Wrapping the REST calls in a Ruby object Uses the same conventions that already exist in Rails Allows new developers to dive right in without learning the REST URI structure. One module definition for all the tables
StarRez o Ra API Wra er We took this: https://{server}/services/select/Entry.xml/68607 And made it this: entry
=
Entry.find(68607) We can then run simple methods: entry.name_first
#
=>
“John” entry.name_last
#
=>
“Doe” entry.gender_enum
#
=>
“Male”