I don’t know what has gotten into me but for the past few months I have been *obsessed with Interoperability – I just cannot get it off my mind. Perhaps it is because I keep drawing PowerPoints about how everything must be connected to everything. Perhaps it is my personal hidden shame that we did not do a better job connecting Sakai and uPortal during the Sakai Project (2004-2005). I don’t know why but lately I cannot stop thinking about Tool Interoperability.
Some points…

IMS Tool Interoperability Version 2 is starting and I am getting pulled into it. Wimba and Microsoft are leading and doing a great job. I secretly (don’t tell anyone) just want to adopt the PowerLinks web services as IMS TI version 2. I like PowerLinks web services – I only have seen a high level document – but what I see looks nice. Of course IMS TI 1 is based on and pays homage to a small subset of PowerLinks back inthe WebCT days.
Sakai will support RSS, Atom, and OPML feeds for version 2.4. This allows you to track a bunch of Sakai servers with federating RSS feeds – you can get a system-wide (all sites) or a single site feed. This is the end of a task that I set for myself at a bar in New York City drinking a pint of Guiness with Bill Thompson of JA-Sig and Rutgers fame. I was exasperated at hte time, having tried everything to connect Sakai and uPortal in a way that *made the users happy* – we had put a lot of effort into demonstrations which were a lot of work – but users just yawned. SO I said to Bill – “What *do* you portal guys want??” – he said, “Make me some iCal feeds and RSS feeds – I wil send the RSS through some XSLT and make a nice dashboard for my users – they can just launch into your app from the dashboard if they like.”. He added, “and believe me – I do *not* want Sakai to run *in* my portal – I just want a good usefu; dashboard.”. I like that kind of thinking.
Sakai 2.4 will also support JSR-168 using Pluto 1.1. At the same time uPortal 3 should also use Puto 1.1 instead of Pluto 1.0. This means that the *exact same war file* can be dropped into uPortal or Sakai and the portlets will jsut work. SO we have war portability – something that the portal community does not do well at all. But with Pluto 1.1 (the magic sauce) we converge on a portable WAR format by choosing the same implementation. Not to mention the speed at which Sakai and uP3 can get to JSR-286 by soimply following Pluto. These efforts have nicely brought the Sakai, uP3, and Pluto communities much closer together. So this is like a nice little treansportable tool unit – finally JSR-168 is having some effect.
I played with the IMSTI tool in Sakai and worked with Anthony and helped make it work on HSQL db. Then to test it I needed a test jig so I wrote this:
http://www.sakaiproject.org/imsti-test/
This includes source code to provide basic support for launch PHP tools using IM TI. This also will help a lot in testing TI features.
I learned a lot about nusoap and really and truly reached the conclusion that SOAP is crap. No wonder everyone does REST – after 6 days struggleing with SOAP – REST seems like nirvana.
Enough for now.. Back to catching up on EMail riding the Michigan Flyer bus from Detroit to Lansing with it cool and free wireless.