[Building Sakai] Google App Engine now supports Java

Fri Apr 10 01:51:30 PDT 2009

On Apr 9, 2009, at 17:50, Nate Angell wrote:

> 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.

This is directly in line with my thinking around Sakai 3.

>
> 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?

In my most recent batch of Sakai 3 slides I called this "Sakai thick  
or thin" (better nomenclature very much appreciated!).  The idea is  
that Sakai should make it quite natural to decide that you want much  
of the functionality to live elsewhere (Google). Because we don't have  
a financial incentive to "own" the campus enterprise, we should be  
quite pleased to see (parts of) Sakai used in this way.

I think LTI is promising in this regard and we're lucky to have Chuck  
around to help us do it right and to push the specification in the  
right directions.

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

The new development process will do just this. Exactly what that  
rethinking will result in isn't entirely clear yet, but many folks  
have recognized the limitations of the core/provisional/contrib  
categorization.  In Sakai 3 we should have a kernel release and then  
multiple release bundles.

>
> 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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>>
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-- 
Michael Korcuska
Executive Director, Sakai Foundation
mkorcuska at sakaifoundation.org
phone: +1 510-931-6559
mobile (US): +1 510-599-2586
skype: mkorcuska