[Building Sakai] Google Meets Sakai

[Steven Githens]

On 10/06/2010 11:58 AM, Nate Angell wrote:
> Sakaigers:
>
> In case you missed it, I blogged about rSmart's new Google Docs
> integration for Sakai, including a short demo screencast:
> http://xolotl.org/blog/xolotl/sakai-meets-google
>
> As I state in the blog, rSmart expects to contribute the integration
> to the Sakai community. We expect to release it in our upcoming 2.7.1
> version, after which you'll be able to take it for a spin on mySakai:
> http://mysakai.rsmart.com/
>    

Neat.  Were you guys able to reuse any of the code from Sakai/GDocs from 
the prototype we built a few years ago or did you need to start from 
scratch? [1]

Which actually raises a good question.  Being able to write resource 
plugins for Sakai 2.x is still an incredibly important thing to do, and 
I'm curious what is the most straightforward way to do it these days 
that people have found, since you have to interop with wacked out Sakai 
session variables and request filder forwarding and whatnot?  Back then 
I was using simple RSF producers to it.  I'm wondering if it could be 
accomplished as well with some simple Jython/Rhino/Groovy type of 
servlets that tie into all that tool forwarding, so it could be easy to 
write lots of resource plugins quickly.

It was just too much scaffolding.  For instance, if it was really 
lightweight to do it, you could also do lots of BLTI stuff like etherpad 
in resources.

A few questions:

1) Does it cache documents at all?  So if you change something on the 
Google end, and you reopen say, a PDF version of the document, you get 
the regenerated one.  It would be cool, if it always kept the last 
opened one available in the local Sakai storage so if you ever need to 
sever your ways with the google servers, or if there is an outage in 
gdocs [2] you still have at least something there.

2) Can anyone other than the original author edit the documents (does it 
use Sakai Role permissions for anything other than viewing?)  I guess 
does it do any sort of provisioning back and forth between Sakai and 
Google?  The API was horribly mismatched the last time I checked.

Cheers,
Steve

[1]  https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/gdataintegration/
http://sgithens.blip.tv/file/1273229/

[2] It could totally happen!


> We welcome your comments/feedback/suggestions.
>
> --
> Nate Angell
> Client Evangelist
> http://www.rsmart.com
> http://twitter.com/xolotl
> http://xolotl.org
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