June 25, 2007

Building Portable Portlets that work in Sakai and uPortal

Charles Severance

JA-Sig Meeting

Denver, CO - June 25, 2007

June 25, 2007

Sakai in one Slide....

• Collaboration, Teaching, and Learning• FOSS - 100% free to use, modify and contribute

• Sakai is 3 years old

• Non-profit Sakai Foundation January 2006

• Financial support from 100+ Higher Education, 15 companies

• Six paid staff members

• 100+ people developing and testing Sakai releases

Overview Video: http://www.dr-chuck.com/media.php?id=64

June 25, 2007

Outline

• Sakai’s JSR-168 Implementation

• Developing JSR-168 Portlets in Sakai

• Current Sakai Portlets Under Development

• My ToDo list of Portlets

• Dimensions of Portlet Portability

• Open Issues / Discussion

June 25, 2007

Sakai’s JSR-168 Implementation

June 25, 2007

Sakai Implementation

• Preferences– Require Sakai site.upd permission to change– Uses Sakai’s preferences as persistence– Portlets can view Sakai preferences (sakai:)

• Edit button only appears for users with “site.upd”– In My Workspace - the person who owns the

home directory has site.upd

• isUserInRole can access any Sakai permission - site.upd, content.read, etc.

June 25, 2007

Developing Portlets in Sakai

June 25, 2007

Documentation

• https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn//reference/trunk/docs/architecture/sakai-168-portlet-tool.doc

• https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn//reference/trunk/docs/architecture/sakai-168-portlets.doc

June 25, 2007

When to Use JSR-168 in Sakai

• When you don’t want an iFrame• When your persistence needs are easily

modeled by per-placement preferences• When your functionality may be reused

outside of Sakai

• It is OK to write a very Sakai-specific Portlet - just understand it is not portable

June 25, 2007

JSR-168 Candidates

• iFrame• Web-Proxy• RSS Reader• WSRP Consumer• Thin Shim on top of Web Services• IMAP Client

• The portlet can be a lot of code and relatively complex - but it needs to be self-contained.

June 25, 2007

portlet.xml and web.xml

• Exactly the same as Pluto 1.1 - allows binary war distribution and webapp drop-in

June 25, 2007

Sakai Implementation

• Hot deploy of a war into webapps - just drop it in - auto registration

• Hot re-deploy of a war into running Sakai– Recompile– Watch re-registration - hit refresh

June 25, 2007

Tool Registration

• Sakai Tool registration is derived from the portlet.xml

• Sakai tool registration file in the war file– webapps/iframe-portlet/WEB-INF/sakai/

SakaiIFrame.xml

• Sakai tool registration - in Sakai’s config area– ${sakai.home}/portlets/iframe-portlet/

SakaiIFrame.xml– ${sakai.home}/portlets/SakaiIFrame.xml

June 25, 2007

<?xml version="1.0"?><registration> <tool id="sakai.iframe.168" title="Web 168" description="For accessing an external

website within the site."> <configuration name="source" value="" /> <configuration name="height" value="600px" />

<category name="course" /> <category name="project" /> <category name="portfolio" /> <category name="myworkspace" />

<configuration name="functions.require" /> </tool></registration>

June 25, 2007

Sakai.properties

You can control the behavior of portlet auto-registration by setting the following property in your sakai.properties. The key is whether tools are registered fully or stealthed.

# Configure Sakai's JSR-168 Portlet Support# Valid values are# all - Register all portlets, checking for tool registrations - all# portlets appear in Site Setup(i.e. none stealthed)# stealth - If there is no tool registration found register the tool # as stealth (i.e. does not show up in Site Setup)portlet.support=all

June 25, 2007

Summary of 168 in Sakai

• Designed to be trivial and simple out of the box - easier to configure than Pluto 1.1 itself

• Permissions and preferences - wired to be Sakai-like with no changes to portlet

• Drop in registration• Hot Deploy / Re-Deploy• Flexible and *optional* configuration to give

tool developer more control over Sakai tool registration - equivalent to Sakai TPP tools

June 25, 2007

Portlets In Development

June 25, 2007

Portable Portlets

• IMS Tool Interoperability 1.0• Sakai Launch Portlet• iFrame Portlet• JSR-168 Test Portlet

• https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/portlets

June 25, 2007

TI Portlet

June 25, 2007

LMS System

Sak

ai

Sakai APIs

Sam

igo,

Co

ncep

tTut

or,

Etc

SakaiIMS Proxy

SessionAnd Services

Bootstrap

IMS TI OutcomeRequest

ApplicationCode

1

2

34

5

6

7

Launch

Outcome

How IMS Tool Interoperability

Works

ExternalTool

SakaiBlackboard

WebCTAngel

June 25, 2007

Sakai Launcher

Sakai Launch View

June 25, 2007

How Tree/Gallery/Launch View Works

uPor

tal,

Plu

to,

or G

ridS

pher

e

Sak

ai

Web

Svc

sC

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orta

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Sak

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Login

ToolList

/portal/page/FF96

June 25, 2007

SakaiSite.getToolsDom<sites> <portal>http://localhost:8080/portal</portal> <server>http://localhost:8080</server> <gallery>http://localhost:8080/gallery</gallery> <site> <title>My Workspace</title> <id>~csev</id> <url>http://localhost:8080/portal/worksite/~csev</url> <pages> <page> <id>af54f077-42d8-4922-80e3-59c158af2a9a</id> <title>Home</title> <url>http://localhost:8080/portal/page/af54f077-42d8-4922-80e3-59c158af2a9a</url> <tools> <tool> <id>b7b19ad1-9053-4826-00f0-3a964cd20f77</id> <title>Message of the Day</title> <toolid>sakai.motd</toolid> <url>http://localhost:8080/portal/tool/b7b19ad1-9053-4826-00f0-3a964cd20f77</url> </tool> <tool> <id>85971b6b-e74e-40eb-80cb-93058368813c</id> <title>My Workspace Information</title> <toolid>sakai.iframe.myworkspace</toolid> <url>http://localhost:8080/portal/tool/85971b6b-e74e-40eb-80cb-93058368813c</url> </tool> </tools> </page> </pages> </site></sites>

June 25, 2007

iFrame Portlet

June 25, 2007

June 25, 2007

Portlets I Want to Write

June 25, 2007

Dream Portlets

• Portable Portlets– Proxy Portlet from uP3– Bridge Portlet– WSRP Consumer Portlet– Del.icio.us Portlet– Flikr Portlet

• Sakai Only Portlets– Site Hierarchy Tool– Complete iFrame Tool Replacement

June 25, 2007

JSR-168 Portability Issues

June 25, 2007

Three levels of Portable

• Completely portable, self-contained war, runs in any compliant container

• Virtually unportable - war has significant framework dependencies - that are to be provided by the “portal”

• Sort-of portable - war has a set of clear pre-agreed dependencies to be provided by the portal

June 25, 2007

“Perfect” Portability

• Differences with userinfo structures between portal implementations - Pluto 1.1 helps a little bit here (Gridsphere)

• Differences between isUserInRole– we need a convention here– portlet.xml and security mapping can help

• Preferences semantics and the edit button - we just have to write very clean code and check errors carefully

June 25, 2007

Sort-of Portable

• We create agreement between Sakai and uP3 that certain framework elements can be assumed between the systems.

• This makes a class of portlets that work in Sakai or uP3 but not other containers

• We should encourage other containers to join our “JSR-168” container consortium.

• The APIs should probably not be “Sakai” or uP3 branded APIs to enhance broad adoption.

June 25, 2007

Discussion Questions

June 25, 2007

Questions

• How can 168/286 CSS be improved? Can we speak as one voice - can we add compatibility now?

• Can we agree no a few isUserInRole strings between uP3 and Sakai?

• Do we want to create a zone of “Sort of Portablility” between Sakai and uPortal where we agree that some bits of framework can be assumed between the systems?

• If so, how does that work? What API’s? How to solve shared/war issues? Who is interested in this?

• How do we develop/distribute shared portlets?