Update from Charles Severance on April 5, 2005
I figured that I would drop a line about some of the things that are going
on in Sakai these days. Sometimes it is quiet - too quiet. But there is
much activity underneath the "quiet calm surface". 
Probably the biggest thing is the sakai2 framework stuff led by Glenn Golden
and Craig Counterman - it is really looking good and pretty much done. The
idea is to rewrite and re-factor the low-level "glue" code that connects
tools and services together. In 1.5 things were a bit monolithic which made
it hard to make changes. Integrating things like Samigo and Xwiki into 1.5
was a learning experience which among other things led us to a much cleaner
approach in 2.0. You can see it all in the sakai2 CVS area and read design
documents under Resources in the Sakai Development site on the
collab.sakaiproject.org site.
When you check it out from CVS, don't be surprised that Sakai2 is not yet
"all of Sakai" - now that the framework is in place, the tools and services
are being moved from the Sakai CVS to the sakai2 CVS - in effect re - gluing
things together. It is probably a few more weeks before sakai2 is ready to
handle all development (tools, APIs, etc).
Common services (the new Sakai Gold standard APIs) are forming up in the
common CVS area led by Lance Speelmon and a new set of JSF widgets are being
grown in CVS as well by Jon Andersen and Ed Smiley.
In the tools area, there is a lot of activity:
The grade book is moving well - and always pushing the envelope in terms of
what the framework, APIs and JSF can provide - this is exactly what we
wanted the grade book to do. The Sakai board told us that the grade book
and anything that the grade book depended on was their highest priority for
the 2.0 release.
In a recent development, Sakai is working more closely with OSPI to merge
the OSPI repository with the Sakai Resources. This should be very cool and
provide us a new and improved WebDav based on the Web Construction Kit
(WCK). This will also be really good news for folks who want to deploy OSPI
in their Sakai deployments (probably that includes everyone ).
Mucho mucho gracias to the folks at Universitat de Lleida (David Barroso,
Jose Garcia, Carol Manchó and Alex Ballesté Crevillén) and Beth Kirshner of
the NEESGrid project, we have internationalized versions of the current
Sakai tools. This was amazing work and done with resources completely
outside the core of Sakai!
The existing Sakai tools are being cleaned up and made style guide
compliant. This is a bunch of work and being led by Daphne Ogle.
Foothill is working on a module building tool called Melete - it is going
into pilot production with Sakai 1.5 in a few weeks with 300 classes - very
cool.
I met with the uPortal developers and we are getting on the same page.
Andrew Petro of Yale will be acting to help align the Sakai uPortal efforts
as we move forward.
We are starting work on adding Web Services to sakai2 in anticipation of the
IMS demo at alt-i-lab in late June. While I hate to commit to things, it it
better than 50-50 that Sakai 2.0 will have some basic web services when it
ships (and no Tom this is not an April's fools joke ).
Sakai 1.5.1 is moving along well - David Haines, Lance Speelmon and Daisy
Flemming are putting the finishing touches on the release to hand over to
QA. We are not rushing 1.5.1 - it will come out when it is in good shape.
Each release improves our approach to QA. Craig Countermann has built a
whole series of QA systems, with different databases for more thorough
testing of Sakai running on different databases. Carol Dippel and her
volunteer QA team continue to amaze me. In a way it seems like we are
inventing "open-QA" - time to write a magazine article I think...
At times, it seems like Sakai 2.0 is a "Hamster Wheel" release. We are
running very fast, and yet, when we are all done we won't seem to be very
far away from where we started in 1.5 - but it will be much better code
and much cleaner in the anticipation of the move into the post-2005 model
for development and governance.