[Building Sakai] Portal NEO Prefix

[Charles Severance]

On Mar 17, 2013, at 10:44 AM, David Adams wrote:

> 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.

Dave this document is 100% accurate and 100% up-to-date - see line 300.

>> 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.

Yup - the Archetype should be fixed.   

These Archetypes were built when folks were not looking too closely - we had no chief architect and everyone was "doing their own thing" - technical debt grew.

It was a phase we went through - it does not mean that hacking up the head material in tools without following line 300 of [1] is "right".

> 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.

Yup.  A well-documented Archetype is an outstanding way to get started.  BasePage.java is still wrong - see line 300 of [1].  

The people who wrote the Archetype were not the people who built the core engine of Sakai and the Archetype ignores an important principle.  Easy to fix.  Better to fix it sooner rather than later.  Portal is not going to change and as a result of BasePage.java not following line 300 of [1], Wicket tools cannot make proper use of the rich text editor (and who knows what else now and in the future).

> [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


/Chuck