[Building Sakai] Google App Engine now supports Java

[Noah Botimer]

With this and various mash-up strategies swimming in my mind, I  
immediately start thinking of the Sakai megaverse...  That is, just  
as some services and communities like Facebook, Twitter, Digg -- and  
on the smaller scale, various wikis, message forums, etc. -- are  
becoming more woven, I see a future where Sakai installations have  
some interplay. Sure, we'd have to think about things like shared vs.  
federated identity, cross-institutional access controls and policy,  
and so on, but we would be silly to think that those realities won't  
be very important to us in two years anyway. We've seen bits of the  
future and it's very, very interconnected.

I'd like to distinguish between two aspects of what Steve is saying  
here. There is a valid philosophical and logistical note about free  
software and self-managed services. Then there is something more  
technical, around distributing the pieces of a Sakai service across  
multiple containers, whatever flavor they are. Currently, users are  
bound to a running Tomcat instance, which poses a number of painful  
constraints. Maybe this gives us a new angle to think about why we  
have these constraints and what may be our options moving forward.

So, to my mind, whether or not GAE + Java becomes a specific,  
integral part of some Sakai installations, this is one of those  
reflective moments. We are seeing what's important to the world and  
markets. We have new models and platforms we can examine and use for  
experimentation. Things coming out of the various labs (Google,  
Mozilla, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon) all have the potential of being  
inspiration and crystal balls. It's never the specific toys that  
interest me most -- it's always the ideas and interactions they  
introduce to our world.

Cheers,
-Noah

On Apr 8, 2009, at 10:11 AM, Steven Githens wrote:

> It's a good time too, to start pondering the remaining holes in the
> stack that need OSS replacements so we don't have to depend on Google
> The Company down the road.  For at least the Python stack, most of the
> supported app-engine libraries were pretty standard stuff, except for
> like the Datastore.  Some R&D into things like Hypertable (OSS  
> Bigtable
> impl) and other OSS distributed datastores would be sweet.  It  
> would be
> very cool to drop bundles of various Sakai functionality (probably not
> the entire thing we have now) into AppEngine Compatible containers you
> can throw into racks all over the place.
>
> It's very cool too, that they are being awesome and also focusing  
> on the
> JVM as a technology and not just the language.  As noted on the Jython
> Developers list this morning (from the appengine java release notes):
>
> """
>
> - Jython 2.2 works out of the box.
> - Jython 2.5 requires patches which we'll supply until the changes
> make it directly into Jython:
>   - jython-r5996-patched-for-appengine.jar is the complete jython
> binary library, patched for app engine
>   - jython-r5996-appengine.patch is the patch file that contains the
> source code for the changes
> """
>
> I'm sure there is similar work done from Google for JRuby and other
> things well ( haven't got a chance to read them all myself yet ).
>
> Megacheers!
> Steve
>
>
> Victor Maijer wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Just read the announcement from Google that the App Engine  
>> supports Java.
>> http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2009/04/seriously-this-time- 
>> new-language-on-app.html
>>
>> Are people interested in running Sakai with the App Engine of Google?
>> I think this combination offers an interesting model.
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> Victor Maijer
>> _______________________________________________
>> sakai-dev mailing list
>> sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org
>> http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/sakai-dev
>>
>> TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send email to sakai-dev- 
>> unsubscribe at collab.sakaiproject.org with a subject of "unsubscribe"
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> sakai-dev mailing list
> sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org
> http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/sakai-dev
>
> TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send email to sakai-dev- 
> unsubscribe at collab.sakaiproject.org with a subject of "unsubscribe"
>
>