Academic Calendar Web Service

Two-sentence description

Static HTML pages are no way to provide calendar-based data, especially not in 2010! I spearheaded a project to convert the UW’s academic calendar into a web service (of sorts) to better disseminate that info.

Background

The background of this project has already been written, in the shape of two blog posts I wrote on the subject. One was for the general UW audience at the University Registrar’s blog; the other written for a technical audience of campus developers who care about things like XML payloads, iCal vs. RSS formats, and the like. You can view these posts at their respective blogs or read them both in one place: my own post on the topic.

Skills and Technologies

I’ll leave the real tech-talk for the aforelinked blog entry.

Take Aways

Allocation of resources are what initially drove me to find a solution to this academic calendar problem. The UW Information Technology office would have been the ideal developers of a full-fledged web service to compliment the Student Web Service initiative. But their priorities had shifted and so there was a need to filled for myself and other campus developers. Having no real resources of my own to allocate, I simply had to find a way to get the job done. That amounted to seeing what was freely available (Google Calendar, which didn’t work out, and MyUW, which did) and working with all the stakeholders to bring it to fruition. And that is the essence of a project: making things work with what’s available to you whether that’s a team of 10 and a quarter-million dollars, or just some free software, time, and a few overpriced coffee beverages to grease the skids.