I’m at the first Sakai Educational Partners Program meeting in Denver.
Ken WIner is talking about uPortal and it’s relationship with Sakai.
uPortal is the open source portal software that is a project born from the Java Architectures Special Interest Group (JA-SIG). uPortal began in December 1999 and has a lot of traction in the higher ed community (over 130 implementing organizations in at least 13 countries).
Two emerging standards for portlets (portal channels) – JSR168 (a java community process) and WSRP (a web services approach).
WSRP is a presentation-oriented web service – once you get the SOAP message back from the web service it already contains markup so it can be thrown right to the screen.
You can imagine uPortal acting as a WSRP consumer or producer. It allows the portal to communicate with other applications across heterogeneous technologies.
Pluto is the Apache project that is a portlet container, that is used in uPortal. In uPortal 2.3 (the current release) you have to use a “Portlet Adapter Channel” in uPortal.
SAKAI has thre different versions of interaction with uPortal:
- Embedded – Sakai runs as a portlet within a stock uPortal
- Injected – Sakai tools run as individual channels within a modified version of uPortal
- Integrated – Sakai tools able to run as inter-communicating processes within a future stock version of uPortal.
