Fresh off getting my first Sling Application finished last night – I came in and told Ian that I had nothing to do today. Of course he said “no” – I needed to build a widget for LTI as well. I said “what widget” and he said that the whole Slikai UI was there under http://localhost:8080/dev and I needed to write a Widget.
I started work at 10AM – with a quick tutorial from Nico and his HelloWorld example, I hacked away at it. After about 2 hours working by myself I had it doing settings and creating the resource. At that point Nico helped me do the actual launch iframe and a few nice bits like a cancel button and it was done and put some polish on it.
It was done three hours after I started – and this was my first widget since I tried back in July 2008. I was pretty pleased with the ease of figuring things out – maybe I just knew more about AJAX, jQuery, JavaScript, and FireBug after writing those chapters in the book. However and whatever the case – it came together quickly and the ability to use Sling to handle all my persistence needs instead of writing a service and plugging it into sdata made an amazing difference in ease of building my widget and getting it running.
So now I am done with today’s task. All is now checked into my SVN repo in contrib/csev/trunk/sling
So I told Ian that I was done with the widget and still had the whole afternoon free! So he told me to add Pluto 2.0 (JSR-286) to Sling/Sakai. That sounds like a good idea – but more than a three hour tour. So we will just draw pictures and call it good.
In summary, I continue to be pleased with the Sling/Sakai combination and eagerly look forward to its evolution.
The additional README bits are below. Again many thanks to Ian and Nico for their patient mentoring.