Sakai Development Diary: Post One

Today I still don't have a development environment. It's beginning to look as though this will be the issue which holds up the project, as it was due a fortnight ago. It's pretty clear that having an installation of Sakai to work with is absolutely vital, and will give me valuable information about how it works. Without one, this post will have to be short.

One thing I have discovered is that I should be working on the CLE rather than the OAE, meaning that the OAE Widget Library I mentioned yesterday will not be relevant. As far as I can tell, there is no equivalent environment to help developers of add-ons to the CLE. The list of projects in the Sakai jira server is not illuminating, to say the least. What's listed is just the name of each project, the code used to distinguish it in jira, the name of the lead, and an (optional) URL. So there's no description to help a reader know what the projects are. Quite a few don't have a URL listed, and others just link to the list of bugs. And many of the names are not entirely descriptive: Sakora, for example, turns out to be a tool for integration with IMS. All this makes it hard to know what is going to be relevant.

The other thing I realised today is that I will really need to understand the Resources tool in Sakai (a web based file management system for Sakai). That is used in the installation of Sakai for which the work is being done, and it is clearly useful for the selection of files to then deposit through SWORD. I have found some very basic documentation for users, but hopefully I will learn more when I can install Sakai for myself.

My next post will come when I have a development server set up.