Thanks to some timely help from Jim Martino of Johns-Hopkins providing a test uPortal instance – I kind of got after the Sakai JSR-168 portlets. I fixed some bugs and cleaned and tightened things up a lot.

The biggest thing is that I built a brand new variant of the Portlet called SakaiLaunch (added to SakaiGallery and SakaiTree). SakaiLaunch is the best of the portlets and probably almost makes all of the others obsolete.
SakaiLaunch eliminates all but one iframe and provides a very clean and simple breadcrumb navigation. It also autosizes like the Charon portal so there are *no* scrollbars. There is only one tool on the screen at one time. The reset button is folded into navigation.
I attach a few action shots of SakaiLaunch working in Pluto 1.1.
I fixed a number of nagging issues with Sakai’s web services – like the lack of a real session, the loss of login events, and chat not working when you log in over web services.
Improved the debugging of the portlets – added a property to control debug printing. I left the portlets chatty by default to help in debugging.
Figured out how to deploy the portlets in Pluto 1.1 and tested the portlets both in Pluto 1.0 and Pluto 1.1. Also figured out how to make a generic, uploadable war – I tested this in Pluto 1.0 and she works. Here is the war.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/sakai/portlet/sakai-portlets-r14056.war
To really make it work you should un-war it and set the portal password and sakai host address in sakaiportlet.properties and then war it back up prior to uploading to your portal. Also make sure to get all the patches listed below (commits) installed in your Sakai before doing too much playing. The inside Sakai improvements are important to make it all work smoothly.
Remember that you must pull the portlet out of svn separately form the rest of sakai:
cd ~/dev/sakai
svn co https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/portlet/trunk portlet
The “portlet” directory shoudl be a peer to the “portal” directory once properly checked out.
Note – If you want to use Pluto 1.1, you should look at this blog post.
http://www.dr-chuck.com/csev-blog/000194.html
Related JIRAs: SAK-2473, SAK-6113, SAK-3134, SAK-5827
Related Commits: 14062, 14063, 14064, 14065