[sakai2-tcc] Annotation based injection within Sakai components

[Adams, David]

Matthew Jones wrote:
> [re session state transferability] This isn't even a problem users notice

Well, they notice when an app server crashes and they lose their work or get signed out entirely. And they notice that code updates require outage windows of at least 15 minutes (you can sometimes do rolling upgrades, but unless you're doing it over the course of hours, there will be a period of time where users will experience unreliability).

> the bigger one is that session state results in users not being able to open more than one tab.
> You have no idea (or maybe you do) about how many users want to open one assignment in
> one tab and another in another tab. In Sakai this is impossible because your state is kept in the
> session on the server so if you try to do something, it has an effect on whatever you did last.
> Back in the world of a single tab browser (Internet Explorer 6) that existed when Sakai was
> created this was a great idea. After 2008 though this was just confusing and useless to the
> majority of users.
>
> I think both the session problem and the state persistence go together.

Great point. Users are right to expect our webapp not to break their web browser. Being able to open multiple tabs easily was a huge leap forward in browser functionality, and it's incredibly frustrating to users when they run into the problems caused by this feature being broken. Is it an inherent problem of JSF or is there not some way to work around it? It appears to me (not a developer) that for most JSF tools, Sakai provides JSF, so is there no way to correct (or at least get closer) through some global configuration or code changes in the JSF project?

I'd estimate that a large percentage of user problems that get escalated to my (operations/log/db troubleshooting) level are related to this failure. And I expect there are 10 times as many users who don't report, but just chalk it up to the flakiness they've grown accustomed to. We're talking dozens or hundreds of such issues, many minor, each week. I think fixing it would be a huge benefit, though if fixing it means rewriting every single JSF tool with some other presentation layer, perhaps not.

But if addressing this problem can also help solve the session transferability problem, then it's a great thing to add to the list.

David Adams