[Building Sakai] Remove iframes from Sakai's Portal markup (SAK-25503)

[Charles Severance]

Hi all,

I just wanted to update you all on the iFrame-Removal effort.  Things are pretty complete and Sakai works pretty nicely with iframes eliminated - it is a lot quicker and we could come up with a skin that was a responsive design that adjusted the entire document with merged portal navigation and tool content.

Just to make it really clear - this will be left *off* as default for Sakai-10.  There are enough little things to test and fix that I don't think we have time for in Sakai-10.

My feeling is that we should strive to have this default to on for Sakai-11.   My plan is that sometime after Sakai-10 is out to switch the default in trunk to be frame inlining so we can start fixing little things that break so we can have a solid iframe-free Sakai-11 release.

This is not a final decision and we will revisit the discussion at the Apereo unconf and summer conference.   But I just wanted to let folks know about my rough plans and timeframe so you can play a bit with the feature or at least have in mind my plan is for Sakai-11 to ship with this.

/Chuck

On Dec 25, 2013, at 9:46 AM, Charles Severance <csev at umich.edu> wrote:

> I created a JIRA to track progress to remove the iframes from the portal's markup. 
> 
> https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-25503
> 
> This may sound daunting, but it really means using the same technique of tool content inlining from the PDA portal. Since we have been using and debugging the PDA portal for quite some time no.
> 
> The work in the main portal has already started in SAK-25494 and if you want to see it in action, set the following property in a trunk checkout:
> 
> portal.inline.experimental=true
> 
> If you set this, you will notice that left-nav tool switching URLs switch from
> 
> http://localhost:8080/portal/site/963b28be-1d37-4d6c-b876-1f177784466f/page/0dedb05e-219d-4d0b-b9bc-72ca3e1cd750
> 
> to 
> 
> http://localhost:8080/portal/site/963b28be-1d37-4d6c-b876-1f177784466f/tool/eb9909db-71ef-4dcf-9fbb-daf46b70adb2/overview.jsf
> 
> "page" becomes "tool"  and the last parameter is tool id instead of page id.  Also the URL starts to grow with the GET parameters the tool is putting on.
> 
> Nearly all the tools will work immediately.  A few will be confused - for example if you do Site Info and Page Order - you will see the tools losing track of where they are as they forward back and forth.   Of course this can be fixed.   But there will be lots of little issues that need to be found and fixed before this can be used across Sakai.
> 
> But it is nice to be able to use the back button :)
> 
> Happy holidays and comments welcome.
> 
> /Chuck
>