(12-18) Databases and the ERIC API

This week, I began reading documentation on the ERIC API. ERIC stands for Educational Resource Information Communication, and it's purpose is to integrate two separate systems while allowing both systems to operate independently. To the best of my understanding, it's a replacement for the OAuth authentication system, for OAuth struggles when dealing with two apps with different authorization processes. The ERIC API has a pretty straightforward method of authenticating programs.

1. The requesting site converts the student's login into a UUID.
2. The student gets redirected to the eric module on the site being requested.
3. The student logs into that site and grants the requesting site permissions in the ERIC module.
4. The ERIC API randomly generates a code that is sent back to the requesting site, and a connection is made.

In the future, I will need to look through the source code of the ERIC API and find out how I can make it work with Canvas, for it was developed to be a plugin for Moodle.

Additionally, I have begun learning about databases. for in order to have our achievements work the way we want them to, we need to have a database with three separate tables. Table one will have a list of all the achievements, table two will have a list of all the users, and table 3 will have a list of achievements earned by users, sorted by some kind of UUID we will either develop on our own, or grab from the ERIC API. I have decided to use MySQL 5.7, so I have been reading up on the documentation and installing it on my server.

This next week, I will develop the achievement database, and begin implementing the ERIC API into our system.