[Building Sakai] Google App Engine now supports Java

[Nate Angell]

Maybe you and I should just chat alone Noah & not bother the others  
with our musings ;) Your thoughts here remind me of a big part of what  
I was trying to get at in my post about Sakai, Twitter & Drupal.
http://xolotl.org/node/319

My question is where is it useful to draw boundaries around Sakai's  
core. GAE may make it possible to draw new boundaries on a purely  
technical level, outside the tomcat/etc container.

I still think institutions will want some kind of core that they  
control and own (even if it is outsourced to the cloud), and Sakai  
should fill that need as a primary function.

Yet a rethinking might be healthy to also serve those institutions  
that have adopted some different core and want to incorporate Sakai  
functionality. Samigo/Mneme as a service anyone?

That is why I think the core/provisional/contributed statuses might be  
rethought on different criteria than maturity.

On Apr 8, 2009, at 7:45 AM, Noah Botimer <botimer at umich.edu> wrote:

> 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
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