[Building Sakai] Sakai on Rails

[David Adams]

Hey Jim, everyone,
I can say that the Sakai on Rails project never went any further than
my proof of concept. JRuby has progressed quite a lot since those
days, and there are more tools for supporting Ruby-based servlets
these days. Really the next step in the process, had I continued
working on the idea would have been to provide a gem that would do all
the Sakai specific configuration and provide a few Rails-friendly
libraries to provide access to the Sakai API in an idiomatic way.

Six years later, the Ruby webapp world is more mature, and it should
be possible to write some more generic libraries that would provide
Sakai functionality for any Rack-compliant Ruby app so that you
wouldn't be stuck only supporting Rails as there are a large number of
well-architected swappable components these days to provide
lightweight but powerful ORM, REST, and rendering support.

I'd be willing to contribute to such a project in terms of general
JRuby/Rack support for Sakai. We don't have a concrete reason to do so
here at VT, but if Jim or anyone else has a specific project in mind,
I am definitely willing to throw in whatever support I can to getting
something functional up and running. If a workable library were in
place for such integration, I think it could be a major help
particularly to developing lightweight tools such as administrative
widgets where Sakai is missing some important functionality.

David Adams


David Adams
Director, Systems Integration and Support
Virginia Tech Learning Technologies


On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 8:29 AM, Jim Eng <jimeng at umich.edu> wrote:
> David Adams did a presentation in 2010 about the possibility of developing Rails apps to run in Sakai.  At the time, David said it was mostly proof-of-concept and that there were some rough spots.  I'm wondering whether that has changed in the past three years.
>
> Has there been any follow-up?  Has anybody developed anything using this approach?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Jim