[Building Sakai] Portal NEO Prefix

[Charles Severance]

On Mar 17, 2013, at 2:25 PM, David Adams wrote:

>> These Archetypes were built when folks were not looking too closely -
>> we had no chief architect
> 
> Do we have a chief architect now?

Sadly no.   

But chief architect is more than being designated to make decisions.  It has to do with also being their a few years later to apologize when a decision they made turned out to be wrong and to be there to fix the decision.  The chief architect position is one of daunting responsibility far more than one of blissful authority and unlimited power.

I am the lead on the portal and I am not going to make the portal worse just to let tools be sloppy in their compliance with our specs.  Because if it breaks - I am stuck with it.

The specs from 2005 *are* the Sakai specs for the 2.x platform - they are as true today as they were in 2005.  These specs form the foundation of how tools and the portal cooperate.   The fact that they are unchanged testifies to the high quality of these specifications from early 2005.   If you want to understand how the request filter works or the format of tool registration XML  or the relationship between Sakai sessions and Tomcat sessions, or virtually anything that underpins the Sakai architecture - you read these documents.

Your argument seems to be based on "Tool developers did not know about these documents, they did not read these documents, they did not comply with documents, they made up their own convention based on doing view source of compliant tools, and came up with something that kind of worked for a while, and now that enough time has passed we are unwilling to comply with the specs even though it is likely a relatively straightforward change and will enhance all wicket tools and actually remove code fro wicket tools that replicates portal functionality in a brittle manner".  

It is kind of like getting stopped for doing 80 MPH on the way to work some morning and using as a defense that you have been driving 80 every day for the past year and never got stopped.    That is a bad defense if you are trying to get out of a speeding ticket.

If you want to separate this conversation into (a) we agree that we will fix the out-of-spec-tools and then separately (b) what is the best way for the portal to function - that is a more interesting conversation.   But as long as you keep saying "change the portal to let tools remain out of spec" - that is a non-starter.

/Chuck
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