[Building Sakai] Sakai3 IM and presence capabilities

[Ian Boston]

Adam, 

All the information that follows relates to Sakai Nakamura, the Sakai 3 backend. Some of the functionality that is present there will be available or used by the front end, but not all.

Presence.
We currently have a presence implementation based on in memory maps of presence locations, replicated over the entire cluster. A prototype was originally implemented in response to scalability issues with presence in Sakai 2, where maintenance of presence required database operations. I don't think anyone ever used it in anger there. In Nakamura the presence is maintained by RESTfull calls made by the front end to record the location of presence, and IIRC the Presence service emits events that are routed to JMS.  It first appeared in v0.1-20091123, before there was good Spec writing, but you may find documentation at [1]. There is a long term intention to integrate with XMPP, and we might replace the cluster replication of maps with JGroups based messaging which should scale further.


Shindig/OpenSocial.
Shindig and OpenSocial have not been implemented as yet, the Roadmap Feature for these are specified at [2],[3]. The OpenSocial Social API will be integrated with the Social Graph that was introduced in v0.1

The Nakamura implementation of presence is not based on OpenSocial which may expose presence status taken from the presence service. OpenSocial only defines and Shindig implements 2 things. A Gadget specification for converting OpenSocial Gadget XML into a form that can be displayed in the browser, and a Social API specification that provides a Gadget a standard API for interacting with that Social API. At the moment, we haven't determined exactly how all parts of the Social API will interact with the services inside Nakamura.


I hope that make sense and gives you some idea of implementation roadmap for the backend. At the moment I cant tell you when these will appear in the front end.


Ian


1 http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/KERNDOC/Implementation+Details
2 http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/KERNDOC/KERN-529+OpenSocial+Gadgets
3 http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/KERNDOC/KERN-530+OpenSocial+API
4 http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/KERNDOC/KERN-531+Social+Graph+and+User+Connections

On 1 Mar 2010, at 15:05, Adam Hocek wrote:

> I would be interested in knowing if there is any ongoing discussion or work on the presence capability in Sakai3.  My understanding is that this will be based on Apache's Shindig (Opensocial).    I assume presence in Sakai 3 will be similar to groups (and resources) and not be within the context of sakai sites? Also, would like to find out if support for external instant messaging services through gateways are planned?  If anyone has more information on this or can point to where I can find out more this would be most appreciated. 
> 
> Adam Hocek
> Information Technology
> Marist College
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