[DG: Open Forum] Sakai OAE

[Nicola Monat-Jacobs]

> For years now, the CLE has stagnated

I don't wholly agree. Could it have used more resources during this period?
Most definitely. But there has been a core group of people who've been
trying to continue to bring innovation to CLE. Was/Is there still a danger
of stagnation? Yes.


On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 3:39 PM, David Adams <daveadams at gmail.com> wrote:

> Mark Norton wrote:
> > How much change to the architecture will be needed?  Is it "back to the
> > drawing board" or just a matter of tuning things up?
>
> After four years, the system can't support more than a few dozen users
> at a time, or search through more than a few thousand objects.
> Meanwhile, the potential customers need to operate and hundreds or
> thousands of times that scale. The architecture has been flawed from
> the start; built on false assumptions, buzzwords, and crossed fingers.
>
> In designing the OAE, all the clever and interesting parts of the
> CLE's design were thrown away, and all the weird and broken things
> about the CLE's design were doubled-down on. Anti-RDBMS sentiment has
> been behind most of the poor design and performance problems in CLE,
> and we see that things are that much worse now that the RDBMS has been
> eschewed entirely. The ironic part is, the NoSQL storage system itself
> is actually just an application that uses an RDBMS for storage.
>
> Developers hate thinking about how the data gets stored and having to
> worry about optimizations, but adding another layer of abstraction
> does not eliminate those details, it just makes them much harder to
> address. RDBMSes may be boring and awkward, but they're mature, well
> understood, well supported, and easy to optimize. Yes, it's old
> technology, but the reason we still have relational databases is that
> they actually turn out to be an amazingly efficient way to store data.
>
> >>  OAE does not have all the features of an LMS
> >
> > How big a gap is this?  Is there a chart of targeted features with
> > status?  If not, why not?
>
> The gap is complete. OAE has no distinctly LMS-type features. Vague
> nods to the need for these have shown up in various roadmaps
> (generally released each summer), but always at the elusive "stage
> three" milestone that never actually gets reached. If anything, the
> story of OAE is that it long ago moved from being an attempt to write
> an LMS to being an attempt to write a *platform* for someone else to
> write an LMS. That it's attempting to build a generic platform on top
> of other generic platforms (Sling, Jackrabbit, etc) may be part of the
> problem.
>
> >>  1. and 2. are taking too long
> >
> > It wasn't a resource issue until most of the big players left. Why is it
> > taking too long?
>
> If you've read Frederick Brooks's The Mythical Man-Month, it's no
> mystery. The lack of technical leadership, poor communication, lack of
> documentation, vague design goals, the Second-System Effect,
> inconsistent staffing, mission creep. As to our current situation,
> facing a broken system that needs a redesign, we should turn to John
> Gall's The Systems Bible: "A complex system designed from scratch
> never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over,
> beginning with a working simple system." To write a successful complex
> LMS, we would need to start from a successful simple LMS.
>
> The Sakai Foundation should take this as a perfect opportunity to
> abandon the OAE project and direct whatever resources are left into
> improving the CLE. For years now, the CLE has stagnated while the OAE
> was sold as being just around the corner, highly capable, and
> providing a smooth transition from the CLE, none of which was true.
> It's time to set the record straight, admit the OAE has failed, and
> save whatever credibility is left. Put the resources that still exist
> into improving the working system we do have instead of pouring
> endless resources into a non-working system that has no chance of ever
> being fixed.
>
> -dave
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