Sakai App Builder 0.5 released

The very beta first release of the Sakai App Builder plugin for Eclipse 3.2 is now available for developers to try out. Here is the blurb from the page linked above:
The Sakai AppBuilder is a RAD tool that allows you to quickly create Sakai webapp projects in the Eclipse SDK 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. This will not write your entire app for your, but it should help you get started quickly.
This was alpha tested on the folks who attended the Tetra ELF cafe workshop in Oxford, England the last week of September (and they were quite good sports about it).

Generic DAO version 0.7

I will be demoing the initial release of my Generic Dao package at the Tetra ELF Cafe Workshop in Oxford, England this week. This package allows a developer who is using Spring and Hibernate to avoid the tedium of writing DAOs. It is very compact and has extensive javadocs. More information is available at the VT confluence site here:
https://content.cc.vt.edu/confluence/display/DEV/Generic+Dao

Cafe 2.2.x distro created

I created a 2.2.x distibution of the sakai-cafe that is specifically for version 2.2.x of the Sakai code base today. This is because the current 2.3 trunk code breaks the cafe distribution and I don't have a good way to fix it for now without making the cafe distribution huge and bloated.
I have been meaning to do this for awhile anyway so that developers have a way to do their development work on a specific version of Sakai (probably the one they are running on their campus).

Upcoming Tetra ELF Cafe

There will be a Sakai Cafe (bootcamp) at the Tetra conference at Oxford, England from September 27-28. The training will be on writing Sakai tools and best practices. Antranig Basman and Ian Boston will be present. It should be a good time and there will be a lots of new materials in the cafe as a result. Writing Sakai apps should become a lot easier soon if we can get everything to line up.