I am just back from a trip to New Zealand and Australia. I was an invited speaker at the University of Auckland so they covered the expenses of the trip.
The trip was great – I got to sail on the ocean for the first time in my life with Scott Diner. The whole crew at University of Auckland is first rate – Scott, Stephen, janet, and the dev team – I learned a lot while I was there.
I also visited Charles Sturt and talkedwith Mark about the IMS Enteprise Provider – we came up with a nice design that leverages the IMS Enterprise work from Scott Wilson of CETIS – this wil be pretty neat. We decided to go ahead and do the current IMS spec after I talked with Linda Feng of Oracle and got the scoop on the IMS Enterprise Interoperbility demo for next year’s learning impact – we will likely extend IMS Enterprise a bit for the demo – so it is good for us to go ahead and implement the current spec for IMS Enterprise Services for Sakai at Charles Sturt.
Had a great discussion with the Instructional Designers at CSU and realized that I need to make some more PowerPoint about how to teach with Sakai.
I talked to Paul about many different architecture bits – we came up with lots of cool designs to allow some nice upwards compatibilities with their old system – the idea was to make a special tool called “CSU setup” with buttons that say “Add Subject Outline”, “Add Osais” and other CSU local links – put that in the worksite setup – this is a better approach than patching site setup as it allows for business rules.
I ran into some SOA folks as there was a Australia-wide SOA conference at CSU the day after I left – had some great conversations – showed them my new favourite ZapThink SOA poster. Talked a lot about my new slogan “Free the Data” and how RSS and iCal federation is the way of the future – and to think about the Web interface as the “fall back” interface.
Talked a lot about the role of Portals, JSR-168, JSR-286, and all of that stuff. Debated whether or not to rewrite their local perl-based five-year-old MyCSU portal – I suggested not to rewrite but to add a cool synoptic web services to Sakai that returns a cool Dom and then put some simple XSLT in their current portal. Sweet idea. Free the Data! Redo the portal later as a separate project and do it right – perhaps waiting for 286 based portals to appear. At least if you are rewriting – have a reason other than “we need a Sakai Dashboard!”
Later met with James Dalziel of LAMS fame. They are just about done with V2 – looks great – talked about RAMS, CORDRA, Shib, XACML, et c etc etc. This is some really really good stuff. Take a look at the CORDRA project – tres interestingvous!
Notes to self:
– We need to have a Sakaiproject starting page for project managers, developers, designers, and other folks involved in the project. We can call this the Sakai Intranet page – it compliments the Sakai Home Page.
– The Continetal Presidents Club in SFO has free wireless – Sweet
– Register the domain www.freethedata.org