[Building Sakai] MercuryPortal and CharonPortal

[markjnorton at earthlink.net]

I have used MercuryPortal in the past to develop Sakai tools.  It was somewhat useful at the time.  Beyond development, MercuryPortal served as a code example of how to develop a Sakai portal.  I have built other Sakai portals using it as a reference.  It has the advantage of being far simpler than either CharonPortal or SkinnableCharonPortal.  Given that lack of documentation on how to do this sort of thing, simplicity is in it's favor.

All that said, I'm neutral on removing MercuryPortal.  If I needed it, I could always go back to an older release and grab it.

W.r.t Charon, if we can find the labor to eliminate dependencies on CharonPortal (such as OSP), then I'd be in favor of eliminating it.  Since SkinnableCharonPortal is the one being used, having an alternative, older version around is just confusing.

FWIW,
Mark Norton


-----Original Message-----
>From: Beth Kirschner <bkirschn at umich.edu>
>Sent: Jul 21, 2010 8:53 AM
>To: Steve Swinsburg <steve.swinsburg at gmail.com>
>Cc: sakai-dev sakai-dev <sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org>
>Subject: Re: [Building Sakai] MercuryPortal and CharonPortal
>
>I would be in favor of removing the mercury portal -- as far as I know  
>it's never been used as intended. However, I'd be against removing the  
>CharonPortal from the build. I think the work involved to remove it or  
>transition it to OSP would better be served fixing high priority bugs.
>
>Thanks,
>- Beth
>
>On Jul 21, 2010, at 7:45 AM, Steve Swinsburg wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've been doing some work on the portal and am interested in the  
>> MercuryPortal and CharonPortal, and whether or not they can be  
>> removed.
>>
>> First the MercuryPortal. It has a note in the source that it is the  
>> developers portal. But as a developer, I've never used it before.  
>> Also, on sakai-dev there was a proposal back in May to remove it as  
>> it is disabled by default and may present risks, since it is  
>> unmaintained.
>>
>> Next up is the CharonPortal. For all intents and purposes this looks  
>> unused, being superseded by the SkinnableCharonPortal which is the  
>> one that is configured in the portal web.xml and is actually used.  
>> Grepping through the source shows no references to CharonPortal and  
>> it even outputs its' markup via out.println(s); statements so I am  
>> guessing this is definitely unused.
>>
>> To test my theories I removed the mercury-portal from the base pom  
>> and deleted mercury.war from Tomcat and CharonPortal.java from  
>> portal-impl. Built and started up. All is well.
>>
>> What are your thoughts?
>>
>> Note: I originally posted this to the maintenance team but we've  
>> moved it to sakai-dev for wider discussion. I have since learnt that  
>> the OSP portal depends on the CharonPortal so another possible way  
>> forward is to move CharonPortal to the OSP project (Thanks David H).  
>> However, the OSP portal also depends on SkinnableCharonPortal so  
>> that may have implications for making OSP an indie release, or at  
>> least something to be mindful of (separate issue).
>>
>> cheers,
>> Steve
>>
>> p.s. there are also mercury related images in reference which can go  
>> along with the portal if it is removed.
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> 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"