Today I am at Roskilde University in Denmark. My goal is to talk with the folks here and then to make a video that looks at the way Roskilde integrates Sakai into their very unique group riended curriculum.

A cool idea came up in a meeting – “tiny URLs” for resources in Sakai. Here is a basic design. (a) Make a TinyURL service which takes a long URL as a parameter and returns a short URL – storing the mapping between the tiny url and long URL in a simple two column table. (b) change the getUrl method in
content/impl/src/java/org/sakaiproject/content/impl/BaseContentService.java
To consult the tiny URL service before returning the URL and return the short URL.
(c) make a simple servlet – lets call it /s that simply looks up the tiny URL and does a redispatch to the tinyurl’s destination. I think that we could ignore all of the servlet filtering in this first servlet and let the destination do whatever it likes. Perhaps a redirect would be better – but smarter people than me need to decide if a redirect or redispatch is better. What does tinyurl do? So Sakai tinyurls look like:
http://x.y.z/s/FaeD12/
Of course this behavior would be controlled by yet another property because it would have a performance and storage impact as it would require some look up on each URL in the display of a resources page – some basic caching should be done – could be quite simple because the mapping is read only and no mapping is ever deleted.