I don't know what has gotten into me but for the past few months I have been *obsessed with Interoperability - I just cannot get it off my mind. Perhaps it is because I keep drawing PowerPoints about how everything must be connected to everything. Perhaps it is my personal hidden shame that we did not do a better job connecting Sakai and uPortal during the Sakai Project (2004-2005). I don't know why but lately I cannot stop thinking about Tool Interoperability.
Some points...
IMS Tool Interoperability Version 2 is starting and I am getting pulled into it. Wimba and Microsoft are leading and doing a great job. I secretly (don't tell anyone) just want to adopt the PowerLinks web services as IMS TI version 2. I like PowerLinks web services - I only have seen a high level document - but what I see looks nice. Of course IMS TI 1 is based on and pays homage to a small subset of PowerLinks back inthe WebCT days.
Sakai will support RSS, Atom, and OPML feeds for version 2.4. This allows you to track a bunch of Sakai servers with federating RSS feeds - you can get a system-wide (all sites) or a single site feed. This is the end of a task that I set for myself at a bar in New York City drinking a pint of Guiness with Bill Thompson of JA-Sig and Rutgers fame. I was exasperated at hte time, having tried everything to connect Sakai and uPortal in a way that *made the users happy* - we had put a lot of effort into demonstrations which were a lot of work - but users just yawned. SO I said to Bill - "What *do* you portal guys want??" - he said, "Make me some iCal feeds and RSS feeds - I wil send the RSS through some XSLT and make a nice dashboard for my users - they can just launch into your app from the dashboard if they like.". He added, "and believe me - I do *not* want Sakai to run *in* my portal - I just want a good usefu; dashboard.". I like that kind of thinking.
Sakai 2.4 will also support JSR-168 using Pluto 1.1. At the same time uPortal 3 should also use Puto 1.1 instead of Pluto 1.0. This means that the *exact same war file* can be dropped into uPortal or Sakai and the portlets will jsut work. SO we have war portability - something that the portal community does not do well at all. But with Pluto 1.1 (the magic sauce) we converge on a portable WAR format by choosing the same implementation. Not to mention the speed at which Sakai and uP3 can get to JSR-286 by soimply following Pluto. These efforts have nicely brought the Sakai, uP3, and Pluto communities much closer together. So this is like a nice little treansportable tool unit - finally JSR-168 is having some effect.
I played with the IMSTI tool in Sakai and worked with Anthony and helped make it work on HSQL db. Then to test it I needed a test jig so I wrote this:
http://www.sakaiproject.org/imsti-test/
This includes source code to provide basic support for launch PHP tools using IM TI. This also will help a lot in testing TI features.
I learned a lot about nusoap and really and truly reached the conclusion that SOAP is crap. No wonder everyone does REST - after 6 days struggleing with SOAP - REST seems like nirvana.
Enough for now.. Back to catching up on EMail riding the Michigan Flyer bus from Detroit to Lansing with it cool and free wireless.
Posted by csev at February 22, 2007 10:03 PM