EuroSakai: Sakai QA and How to get Involved

Alan Berg, Anthony Whyte, Jean-François Lévêque, and I finished our final two presentations at the EuroSakai Valencia 2010 conference today. The overall theme of these presentations was "Get Involved". The presentations are What is Sakai QA and 10 ways to make a good Sakai release (my apologies to the attendees but 8:30am is just too early for a session). I hope that our main point got across and I hope we provided helpful information for those brave enough to attend.
A few highlights for those who could not make it:

• Alan did another Mexican wave
• I (and others) was still half asleep during the morning session
• Jean-François made a lot of food related jokes
  
• lolcatz were involved
  

Our major theme was "Blood and Treasure" (stolen from Anthony Whyte). If you have assets (people) then you have blood to contribute. If you are looking for ways to get involved please consider these opportunities. If you answer yes to any of these questions, or even if you don't, you may want to sign up to participate in one of these teams.

• Sakai Maintenance Team - are you a java developer? an SVN wizard? want to learn more about Sakai codebase? do you love issue management and/or JIRA? do you like to write unit tests?
  
• Release Management - are you a master of subversion? do you have a passion for merging code? are you running a 2.*.x branch in production?
  
• Quality Assurance - can you use a web browser? do you like trying every little thing in software? are you tired of hearing complaints from users after you upgrade?
  

The other primary and very critical way to get involved is with treasure. If you have some money you can spend on open source and/or Sakai then you have treasure. Consider putting this money into foundation dues or buying into commercial support. Check out the end of the What is Sakai QA presentation for a few options to get involved when you have money but no people (or if you have money AND people).
One final point from our talk. If you are involved, thank you. If you see others who are involved, please thank them.

EuroSakai Bootcamp

Anthony Whyte and I presented the programmers cafe bootcamp at EuroSakai Valencia 2010 on Monday March 1st. This also coincided with my first official act as a Uniconer (short for Unicon employee) and my first presentation as the Sakai Maintenance Team lead.
We had around 30 people in attendance with the majority from Spain. I felt like it went as well as these 1 day technical introductions to Sakai can reasonably go (i.e. a major overload for the participants) and I hope that the attendees had a good experience and learned something valuable. Anyone who wants to let us know what they thought of it can fill out our survey.

EuroSakai presentation - Sakai Best Practices

Alan Berg and I just finished our presentation on Sakai Best Practices at EuroSakai Valencia 2010. It started with a mexican wave (all Alan's fantastic idea) and included tips for creating JIRA tickets, an overview of best ways to take advantage of foundation resources, and some development best practices.
One key point we made during the presentation bears repeating. In many ways the Sakai community is a do-ocracy.

A do-ocracy is an organizational structure in which individuals choose roles and tasks for themselves and execute them. Responsibilities attach to people who do the work, rather than elected or selected officials.

I have also heard people refer to Sakai as a meritocracy and perhaps in some ways it is. But much more than that I think it is driven forward by those willing to act. I hope that we are encouraging people to get involved and act because that is the lifeblood of community source.

Sakai AppBuilder Plugin updated to 0.8.7

The Sakai AppBuilder Eclipse Plugin is updated to a new version (0.8.80.8.7) which includes updates for Sakai K1 and support for Wicket. Many thanks to Steve Swinsburg who did all the heavy lifting on this update. You can install the plugin using instructions here or update it to the new version from within eclipse if you have installed it before.

The Sakai AppBuilder is a RAD tool that allows you to quickly create Sakai webapp projects in Eclipse that will work in the Sakai Framework. Use these as a basis for the projects that you want to make without all the busy work of creating the structures and adding in all the dependencies. You can choose various UI layer options and implementation types to get you started quickly.

NOTE: Updated for the 0.8.8 release (minor fix from 0.8.7)

Marist Sakai Bootcamp

We just wrapped up the Sakai Marist Bootcamp which ran from June 2nd through the 6th at Marist College in PoughKeepsie, New York, USA. There were 32 participants from universities in Michigan, New York, Maryland, Ohio, Hawaii, Canada (not comprehensive) and commercial groups like IBM, rSmart, Unicon, and Serensoft. This is the first Sakai bootcamp of 2008 and I guess something like the 10th one I have taught overall.
Topics covered included Sakai installation and development environments, Eclipse usage, Sakai code structure, development practices and tips, and various Java development tips. Participants had quite a varied level of knowledge from those who were new to Java and Sakai to those who had been using Java for 10+ years and Sakai for 3+ years. There were participatns from higher ed and K-12. Marist is helping provide Sakai services for K-12 schools around NY state and I had a chance to see how they are using Sakai. I felt like the workshop went really well and I enjoyed my time in Poughkeepsie, NY.
Our hosts at Marist treated us very well and provided lunch and snacks every day and a great location to have the workshop. We went to Shadows (a semi open air restaurant along the river) on Tuesday evening and had a good time with fairly traditional upscale american dining. I was honored to have a chance to meet a dean and the president of the college on the last day.
Cheers to everyone who organized things and gave me a chance to come to NY and hopefully expand the Sakai community.

Flickr photos are posted here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/sakaimaristbootcamp/

EntityBroker 1.3.3 released

The new 1.3.3 version of EntityBroker is released. This includes a bunch of new features to make working with Sakai easier but the biggest improvement is full support for RESTful URLs. Now a developer can write an EntityProvider and implement a handful of interfaces and end up with REST access to their entities. This now allows developers to expose data from within Sakai to be read and written via REST calls by other Sakai apps, Sakai helpers, external apps (PHP, Perl, etc.), and client side widgets. This includes support for transformation of entity POJOs to and from JSON and XML automatically. Like everything else in EB, this can be disabled or controlled explicitly if desired. More details on the RESTful entities page.
The other major change in this release is the DeveloperHelperService. This is a shared service that the EntityBroker provides. This service makes it easier to deal with current Sakai data as entity references. Methods include getting current user/location/tool and generating URLs to work with entites and within Sakai. It also provides for some protection against shifting Sakai service APIs as this service API will remain stable and allow access to common things like current user and site without requiring knowledge of the Sakai service structure.
There are few minor improvements in the new version like support for persistent entity properties (without using hibernate) and support for persistent entity tags. There are also improvements in the classloader handling to ensure that the entity system will not hold onto class resources when a classloader reloads (e.g. webapp reload). Thanks to testing by Stephen Marquard this release should be fully backwards compatible with the pervious version.

GenericDao 0.9.5

The 0.9.5 version of GenericDao is now available. This provides the biggest leap in functionality yet with enhancements including support for JDBC and pure SQL (along with Hibernate) and new search methods which use a generalized Search object to make it easy to control restrictions, limits, ordering and bascially everything you would want to put in a search for an object.
For anyone unfamiliar with the package it is mostly a bunch of convenience code to make it a little easier to have ORM like functionality and not have to write the same boring create/update/find/delete methods over and over again. It also provides a simple and extendable interface for working with persistent objects.
I am using the new version to replace the previous hibernate usage in a couple of projects and things seem to work quite well so far. The new version builds on some of the Apache projects like BeanUtils, Google projects like Guice, and the Spring Framework.
I hope to add in support for DDL generation using Apache DDLUtils in the next release.

Download (Maven2):https://source.sakaiproject.org/maven2/org/sakaiproject/generic-dao/
Maven site: https://source.sakaiproject.org/maven2/org/sakaiproject/generic-dao/site/
Javadocs: https://source.sakaiproject.org/maven2/org/sakaiproject/generic-dao/site/apidocs/

On a related note, this release was made using the Maven 2 release plugin which made the process very clean and easy. I recommend it highly.

Roadmaps, Kernels, and Community?

There has been a bit of traffic on the mailing lists about Kernels and Sakai community processes recently. I personally hope that it will encourage more open communication in the community and more transparency around decision making. I have high hopes that some of the proposals I have posted in the Sakai Dev space on Sakai Confluence will spark conversations and encourage people to get involved in various framework improvement efforts.

In particular, I am hoping the following things are worked out BEFORE or AT the Sakai conference in December.
1) What does the Sakai Roadmap look like?
2) What is a framework team? What does it do? Who are the initial members?
3) How does the voting process work in Sakai and what kinds of things should be voted on?
4) Do we have a Sakai Kernel and if so, what does that mean (what is it)?
5) Should we have a code approval process for the Sakai framework and what should it look like?

What are the right answers to these questions? Frankly, that is outside my core area of expertise which is mostly designing and writing software. I have some proposals out there in the hopes that someone smarter will come along and rip them apart and replace them with something that is better. Even if that doesn't happen, I hope they will at least encourage discussion. Isn't that how we arrive at decisions that will benefit us all as a community? I mean, we don't really need someone to make all the decisions for us and tell us what to do... do we?

Sakai AppBuilder 0.82 available

Version 0.82 of the Sakai AppBuilder is now available on the Sakai eclipse update site (http://source.sakaiproject.org/appbuilder/update/). This version will now generate maven 1 project files and maven 2 pom files and will create the links to the local repository for the eclipse classpath for either maven 1 or 2. This also includes updates to the most recent jars being used with Sakai including the recent release of RSF 0.7.2RC1.

Tetra Skye meeting

The Tetra group technical meeting was held last week on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. Tetra currently consists of the following UK higher education institutions: UHI Millenium Institute (hosting), University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, and University of Hull. The meeting took place on the Sabhal Mòr Ostaig campus on the Isle of Skye.

The team discussed various Sakai related issues including hierarchical groups, entity system updates, and local projects such as evaluation system and breeze link tool. Possible JISC funded projects and future plans were also discussed.

Evening activities included boating to pubs, skimming stones on the Sound of Sleat, and debating whether wheat is corn. Pictures are available of the event under the flickr tag: tetraskyemay07. There is also a flickr image set created by myself that you are welcome to view. Thanks and Kudos to Sean Mehan of UHI for doing and excellent job of organizing the meeting and evening events.

South Africa Programmers Cafe

We are currently running the South Africa Programmers Cafe Bootcamp in Potchefstroom, South Africa. The cafe is running from April 16th - April 20th, 2007. There are about 22 people from various South African institutions in attendance. Aaron Zeckoski (me), Antranig Basman, and Tony Atkins are presenting on various topics ranging from Sakai development and RSF to Server configuration and deployment. We have pictures from the cafe available in Flickr if anyone wants to take a look.
The weather has been fairly nice the whole time we have been here. Our hosts from NWU have taken excellent care of everyone and arrangements have been fantastic. Many thanks go to Boeta and Adell at NWU in Potchefstroom for all their hard work in getting things running smoothly and taking care of the roudy and jetlagged presenters. A special thanks and mention here goes to David Horwitz for helping get the funds and generating interest so we could have this event.
Being here in South Africa has been a great experience for me so far and I feel like I have learned a lot about this country in tha past few days here. They have limited internet options available and we currently have to pay for all the data going in and out. The exchange rate has been a nice plus since we get 14 Rand for 1 British Pound (things are quite affordable). I love the South African accent and don't understand a single word of Afrikans but I am having a great time talking to the bootcamp participants and seeing the local area. We will have a chance to see the local area a bit after the cafe ends on friday and I am looking forward to it.