I visited Cambridge this week to see what was up with the new Sling + Sakai (Slikai) work that Ian is working on. I figured that one way or another I would find a way to hack in IMS Simple Learning Tools Interoperability into it – after all I hack LTI into pretty much anything else. One day I will write a FORTRAN version of Simple LTI :).
I figured that in two days I would be a little pressed for time. Day one started out with Ian explaining Sling for about an hour and giving me some hello world stuff. It took me a while to hack each piece together. I started this morning knowning nothing about Sling and now this evening I have my first working application in Sling/Sakai.
Sitting 3 feet away from Ian meant I was never stuck for too long – I was just slow. But by the end of the first day, I am pretty much done – the code is checked in here:
https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/csev/trunk/sling/
All in all I am pretty impressed with Sling. Many important decisions are already made – most of the APIs we think of as “kernel” are in place. There is lots of value to be added – mostly in terms of “helper” APIs to lock down “Sakai conventions” within Sling and keep us from hard-coding convention too widely scattered throughout the code.
There is lots to do – so much more to do – but Sling feels like a great starting point. Performance is always something to worry about – but I am confident that Ian worries about performance even more than I do – so I expect that whatever we run into is solvable.
It was great fun to see this at an early state and to talk issues over with Ian and I look forward to the progress over the next few months and hope that we see some nice shiny stuff by the conference.
The README is below if you want to replicate my experiences.