[Building Sakai] Portal NEO Prefix

[David Adams]

Charles Severance wrote:
> A tool should *never* know the prefix and properly implemented tools
> have no need to know the prefix. None of the core tools has or needs
> any awareness of the prefix.  This means Site Stats is not generating
> head material properly at all.  This will affect more than the skins
> it will affect the rich text editor switching, etc.
>
> So tool *must* take its head material from the portal

I suspect part of the problem is that there's no obvious documentation
on how new tools should interact with the portal. The only place I've
ever found it explicitly described is in the old architecture files
in the reference project[1].

Most developers probably look skeptically upon a document dated 2005 in
terms of the likelihood that it will address any questions they have in
the present.

Is there some other source for this information that's kept up to date?
All of the programmers cafe stuff I can find doesn't get into that level
of detail, instead assuming you're using some framework with supplied
portal integration like RSF or JSF.

> not generate its own head based on cutting and pasting from a view
> source of another tool.

Given the state of Sakai documentation, how else do you expect developers
to learn how to write Sakai tools besides looking at other tools' code?

In any case, after a little more research, I don't believe it was literal
cut-and-paste, though maybe not far off. The code from SiteStats and a
few other tools that follow this pattern of building the head data comes
from the Wicket Maven Archetype[2], which generates a skeleton for your
application using Wicket for the presentation layer.

It's a pretty slick method to get started, and it's recommended on the
Programmer's Cafe site[3]. Given that, I'd say the developers of SiteStats
et al were following the documentation.

[1] https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/reference/trunk/docs/architecture/sakai_tool.doc
[2] https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/x/75GCB
[3] https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/x/1wcQB

-dave