[Building Sakai] Sakai 2+3 Hybrid (Christmas update)

[Christian Vuerings]

I assume that you've all seen the video from Lance [1] which showed some of the work we've done on the Sakai 2+3 hybrid mode. During the last few weeks we've made some changes which should make the overall experience better for the user:

 - Simultaneous login: when you log into Sakai 3 you should be automatically logged into Sakai 2 as well.
 - Instead of having one iframe which contains the whole of Sakai 2 we now only load the tools inside iframes. The list of sites & the titles of the tools are loaded outside the iframe. This gives us more control and more flexibility.
 - When you click on a tool, there is an active status set on the link
 - Added a link next to the title of each tools so you can reset the tool
 - Speed improvements: if a tool was loaded before, you don't need to reload it again.
 - Removed the s23tools widget which became redundant after we added the simultaneous login and the ability to load the list of tools in Sakai 3
 - Because we are only loading a specific tool inside an iframe, I was able to add the header back to the Sakai 2 instance.
 - The height of the iframe is set dynamically.


You can test the latest version out on [2] (admin-admin / user1-test) and you can access the Sakai 2 instance on [3]. If you find any bugs let us know by making a Jira in the Sakai 3 - Core project and start the summary with "Sakai 2+3:". The only issue we encountered so far is SAKAIII-94 [4].


Some guidelines for people who want to modify or add code to the Sakai3 front-end:

 - We now use the K2 proxy service (/var/proxy) instead of accessing the sakai hybrid services directly (/sakai-hybrid/)
 - We try to keep the s23 front-end code as separate as possible (/dev/s23/ & /devwidgets/s23/) from the native Sakai 3 code.
 - You can find the latest K2 code on [5] and s23 3akai-ux code on [6].


Christian

[1] http://vimeo.com/7986913
[2] http://sakai3.caret.cam.ac.uk/dev/index.html
[3] http://sakai3.caret.cam.ac.uk/portal
[4] http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAKIII-94
[5] http://github.com/ieb/open-experiments
[6] http://github.com/christianv/3akai-ux