Sakai 2.3 Integration week went really well. With less than six weeks between Sakai 2.2 ship and Sakai 2.3 freeze a surprisingly large amount of work was done and 2.3 is looking like a nice release.
An number of requirements saw some important progress.

Here are the pictures:
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/09/index.php?img=11-09-06_181447_01.jpg
The attendees were: Andrew Poland, Megan May, Ian Boston, Josh Holzman, Lance Speelmon (Polycom), Jim Eng, Glenn Golden, Beth Kirschner, Zhen Quiang, and Guarav Bhatnagar (from the SakaiBrary project).
Carol Dippel (Sakai QA Director until last June) made an appearance – she happened to be in town visiting and we ran into her at dinner one night:
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/09/index.php?img=15-09-06_122817_01.jpg
Here are pictures of the board about what we worked on during the week:
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/09/index.php?img=15-09-06_171926_01.jpg
Beacon – Will be a Quartz job – not done yet – may not be done – if this does not get done, we can contrib this
Ian’s Hierarchy work will stay contrib
The Charon Portal was flattened with the removal of two of the worst iFrames leaving only the presence and tool body frames. (a requirement)
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/09/index.php?img=15-09-06_171926_02.jpg
We took a set of patches from IBM that makes it easier to deploy Sakai in WebSphere
We added a capability to deep link URLs through Charon into tools – this is still under some debate so folks should use caution when trying to use this – it might change (this addresses some requirements)
We were going to try to refactor the FCK editor so that it came form textarea rather than reference – this was tabled as we wanted to free Joshua to the Common Cartridge group so that test questions would be auto-imported.
Zach Thomas and a small band of developers refactored import – adding common cartridge (a requirement)
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/09/index.php?img=15-09-06_171926_03.jpg
We are going to Java 1.5. Sakai 2.3.0 will ship so that it could run under Java 1.4 – but we are only going to QA Sakai 2.3 on Java 1.5 and are going to “not support” Sakai 2.3 on Java 1.4 – We will police the trunk keeping *out* Java 1.5 dependencies until 2.3 is released – the maintenance branch will *not* be policed and will be allowed to move to Java 1.5.
So the Short summary here is that you should expect to run Sakai 2.3 on Java – 1.5 – you have three months to get ready for this.
We went through and removed any remaining Hibernate 1 syntax so we could change the query parser to be the modern query parser. This was done by a great effort on the part of the folks who support Hibernate apps. Things in contrib may need some work for 2.3. Check with Josh, Aaron, or Lance for details.
Resource Ordering (from requirements) is in.
Resource release / retract (from requirements) is in.
Course management API is in – Josh has providers and Quartz Jobs that you can use if you prefer to integrate your SIS data using the CM approach. This is something that is best thought of as provisional (kind of like search in 2.2) – work with Josh and the CM team if you want to use this new CM integration point.
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/09/index.php?img=15-09-06_172054_01.jpg
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/09/index.php?img=15-09-06_172850_01.jpg
SAK-5295 was not fixed – hopefully it will be fixed during QA
SAK-4295 (Basic Auth) was put in
SAK-5197 and SAK-6033 MySql performance patches – did not make it in but need to get in soon. I do not like to leave performance patches hanging across versions.
SAK-4120 – Role based buttons is in
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/09/index.php?img=15-09-06_172352_01.jpg
http://www.dr-chuck.com/images/2006/09/index.php?img=15-09-06_172155_01.jpg
Here is the provisional outcome:
Podcasts – Goes to provisional
Rwiki – goes to full
Calendar – goes to full
Jforum – – stays contrib
Mailtool – goes to provisional
Blogger – goes to provisional
T&Q – stays provisional
Roster – stays provisional
User Membership – stays contrib – it uses SQL in the tool – we need to move this SQL into the API
Sitestats – stays contrib – just too many performance concerns – we need to think this through
Link Took – moves to provisional
OSP – Stays provisional
A key thing here is that any tool that was moved to provisional is really still “on probation” – if we find something icky in Blogger, mailtool, linkTool, or podcasts – and it is not fixed in a timely manner we will push them back to contrib. The teams responsible for these tools are also responsible for testing them and reporting to Megan as to the fact that they pass QA.
If you find a reason that any of the newly provisional tools have a problem let us know.
Other stuff
Andrew came up with some Quartz jobs that clean up Event and Session tables so that these do not grow OOTB – this can be turned off if you like but we have seen cases where production ends up with performance problems when the DBA’s don’t clean this all up – so we decided to automate it.