[Building Sakai] Sakai on Weblogic

[Dave Ross]

I will echo John's thoughts 100%. We ported Sakai to MSSQL I think
around Sakai 1.5. We never went into production with it, because we
quickly realized it would significantly limit our ability to upgrade
and/or take community patches which were only Q/A'd against Oracle and
MySQL. Thus we bit the bullet and learned how to support a MySQL
environment, and to date we have been very happy with that decision.

-Dave

On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 8:06 PM, John Bush <john.bush at rsmart.com> wrote:
> Having been involved in porting sakai to websphere and heard people's experience with running sakai with terracotta, which exposes some of the same issues, I would not walk into such an endeavor lightly.  The issue is that sakai does not make use of a lot of the built in features of the servlet spec but implements some of the same functionality itself.  The creates potential classloading problems and undermines the value of porting the application to new app servers.  Such is the case with things like session replication and sakai's component manager.
>
> This issues are solvable but I question the real value in spending the time and money to pursue these solutions unless you are talking about scaling sakai to a degree past what is seen by the larger universities who already use sakai.  There is some point where session replication can't be avoided, but in such a case wouldn't it be better to align oneself with the current strategies (terracotta) rather starting a whole new application server port?
>
> I've seen the same issues come up from time to time, regarding app server or database support.  Its typically from organizations that have a skill set in one area, and for whatever reason believe the level of effort required to learn how to manage a new database or app server, is greater than the effort to port the application.   In my experience, this is not the case.   The on going maintenance is never factored in, and it quickly stifles any innovation as people scramble to keep the porting effort moving forward with each release.  I know is somewhat of a development vs operations type battle, and I guess its clear what camp I'm in.
>
> You can dig up the IBM/rSmart presentation in Atlanta that outlines some of the technical challenges.  Also look at chris holdorph's presentation in Boston regarding terracotta.
>
> I'll offer up Cerritos College as an example as well.  They originally wanted to run sakai on mssql because of the reasons I mention above, but ended up moving to mysql once reality set in.
>
> I feel rather strongly about this because I've been involved in porting projects for Sakai and with other projects in the past, and in every case, I think the assumptions for doing so were wrong and cost/benefit was not fully understood.
>
> On Mar 31, 2010, at 4:02 PM, Nate Angell wrote:
>
>> Does anyone have any experience or knowledge of running Sakai on Oracle WebLogic?
>>
>> If so, I'd love to know basic deployment information like deployment status (eg, Production, Pilot), versions of Sakai, WebLogic, database, etc, number of users, etc.
>>
>> Even better, you could supply this information in the Sakai community deployments records:
>> http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/PROD
>>
>> Or if you have even tried Sakai out on WebLogic and have insight into how it works (or doesn't), or even if you just have educated guesses about how Sakai would fare in a WebLogic environment, let me and the list know.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> --
>> Nate Angell
>> Client Evangelist
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>>
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