[Building Sakai] Sakai's External Integration

[Steve Swinsburg]

Hi Raj,

I echo Chuck's comments and would use Basic LTI for this. Whilst this can be done via web services, its no where near as elegant or portable. THat said however, if you only want a few pieces of information, the web service can give you what you are after.  

Read over the doc that Chuck sent about the Basic LTI provider in Sakai. 

For web services, you want to look at the webservices module in the Sakai source tree. Find a file called SakaiScript.jws and SakaiLogin.jws. They contain the methods you need to call.

Also, take a look here:
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/WEBSVCS/How+to+use+the+Sakai+Web+Services

The awesome portlet that Chuck mentions is here:
https://wiki.jasig.org/display/PLT/Sakai+connector+portlet

This embeds entire tools from Sakai into an external system, in this case, uPortal.

cheers,
Steve

On 25/01/2011, at 4:19 PM, csev wrote:

> Raj,
> 
> These services exist. Here is some sample code that might give you some patterns:
> 
> https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/portlets/trunk/sakai-dash/
> 
> https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/portlets/trunk/sakai-launch/
> 
> The code might be a little old.  Here is some more documentation you might find helpful:
> 
> https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/reference/trunk/docs/architecture/sakai_charon.doc
> 
> You might also be interested in using Basic LTI to do this with a simple shared secret instead of web services, making sessions, etc - it is more secure and performs better and has much cleaner security.
> 
> https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/basiclti/trunk/basiclti-docs/resources/docs/sakai_basiclti_provider.doc
> 
> And Steve Swinsberg is the master of using this - he has a uPortal portlet somewhere that does this retrieve/launch completely awesomely.   His stuff is much more modern than the portlets I wrote a whlie back.
> 
> Also Lance Speelmon has done a masterful job in using Basic LTI Provider in Sakai CLE to plug it into Sakai OAE.
> 
> Many choices :)
> 
> /Chuck
> 
> On Jan 24, 2011, at 6:20 PM, Raj Muthusamy wrote:
> 
>> Dear Sakai Developers,
>>  
>> I’m new to Sakai and exploring various options. I have to integrate Sakai with an external web application. Here is what I’m trying to do.
>> -          Call Sakai’s Web Services to pull list of available Courses and publish dynamic URLs (that will launch an external web app) into selected Courses.
>> -          When the URL is clicked, pass user name (encrypted) to the external app through QueryString.
>> -          Call another Web Services method on Sakai server to make sure the user’s session is still valid to achieve SSO integration.
>>  
>> Please let me know if there are Web Services already available to perform these tasks above. Any examples and/or documentation would be greatly appreciated.
>>  
>> Thanks,
>> Raj
>>  
>>  
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