Project Coordination Update

Peter A. KnoopProject Coordinator

Sakai Foundation/University of Michigan

Project Coordination Update

• Sakai Today – 2.4• Sakai Today and Tomorrow – 2.5• Sakai Today, Tomorrow, and in the Future –

Project Coordination Meeting (2.6/3.0?)• Report on activities related to “Building Sakai”

Project Coordination Meeting

• 38 participants (not just committers!)• Share plans and discuss cross-project topics• Develop proposals to help frame topics for

community input and discussion

Release Practices• Option #1– One or more maintenance releases through August 2008,

schedule based on QA – Framework/kernel release in October 2008– 2.6 in March/April 2009

• Option #2– A smaller 2.6 in time for Fall 2008

• 2.6 or 3.0?– If the framework/kernel is sufficiently different from the

current one, then we should call it 3.0• Conference Session: “Whither the Release Schedule?”– Thursday, 6 December, 15:10-16:10 (3:10pm-4:10pm)

Assignments

• Recommend best option for Sakai 2.4• Current version of Assignments– Re-factor database configuration to improve

performance• Updated version of Assignments– RSF-based– Enhance Gradebook integration– Initial release in early 2008– Replace old Assignments in 2009

Cross-Tool Integration

• Support contextual action: replace the wizard-like (helper tool) approach which takes user out of a tool context with 'embedded' view

• Support existing wizard-like helper-tool approach as an option

• Support helper tools that cross presentation technologies (e.g., Velocity, JSF, RSF)

• Enable workflows; helpers that invoke helpers

Content Hosting Service Re-factor

• Re-factor the Content Hosting Service API• Migrate db-based implementation with a JSR-

170 repository• Use outside of Resources– Assignments, OSP, …

Framework/Kernel

• Discussion evolving rapidly…• A framework/kernel “team” and/or a “set of

principals” approach• Branches as opportunities for moving ideas

forward; trunk is the release• Roadmap for improving and updating the

Kernel; moving towards a separate kernel release

Community Processes

• Identify and review current sources of information (e.g., Sakai Community Practices)

• Bring up-to-date and share with community for further comment

• Discuss how to best share outcomes• Apache processes is a good model, but not an

exact fit…

QA

• Developing a common vocabulary• Load testing– University of Michigan (LoadRunner)• Load testing of generic Sakai 2.5 with content

– University of California, Davis (SilkPerformer)– Foundation Resources

• Integration testing– Test Harness– Test Runner

Other Topics Raised

• Enterprise Integration– Postponed for later discussion– Superseded potentially by ongoing work

• Technical Management of Releases– Postponed to a BOF

Sakai Foundation Update

• Goals – Create the highest quality core software– Seek to engage new members of the community

• Priorities– Reliability & Scalability– Usability & Accessibility– Project Planning & Roadmap– Collaboration & Portfolio use cases– Lower Barriers to Contribution

Sakai Today – Community• ~80 production deployments• ~50 pilot deployments• Production Working Group• Deployment Database (Anthony Whyte)• 64 Committers• 83 Contrib Committers

Sakai Today – Releases

• Current Releases– Sakai 2.4 (2.4.1)– Sakai 2.5 (2.5-beta)

• 2.4.x Maintenance Branch is recommended as basis for production deployments

• Post-2.4 Feature Branches – 2.4-compatible version of 2.5 functionality– Assignments, Citations, Content, Gradebook,

Roster

Sakai Tomorrow (or Today)

• 2.5 Release Schedule• Highlights from the Sakai 2.5 release notes• Looking ahead to 2.6 (3.0?) and beyond…

Sakai 2.5 Release Schedule

• Updated in late October• Improve quality of .0 releases

Date Release7 Nov 2007 QA tag 013 (2.5.0.013)

23 Nov 2007 Beta (2.5.0.beta)13 Dec 2007 Release Candidate 1 (2.5.0.RC1)21 Jan 2007 Release Candidate 2 (2.5.0.RC2)12 Feb 2007 Final Release (2.5.0)

Sakai 2.5 QA

• Continuation of QA WG activities– Testing focused in specific areas

• Load Testing (Linda Place, Univ. of Michigan)• Automated testing• Local deployment testing Dec 2007

Sakai 2.5 Adoption Plans

• Early Adopters RC1– University of Cape Town (Dec 2007)– Rutgers University (Jan 2008)– A few smaller organizations• Several versions behind currently• Sakai 2.4 as a fallback

• Next wave– April 2008 – “small” semester rollouts– Aug/Sep 2008 – “large” semester rollouts

Sakai 2.5 by the Numbers…

• Jira: http://jira.sakaiproject.org• 1029 Bugs Fixed– Sakai 2.5.0 Bug Fixes [Tentative]

• 249 Enhancements– Sakai 2.5.0 Enhancements [Tentative]

• 519 Known Issues – Sakai 2.5.0 Known Issues [Tentative]

Sakai 2.5 by the Numbers…• Promoted to Core Status– OSP (ePortfolio tool suite)– Tests & Quizzes (a.k.a. Samigo)

• Promoted to Provisional Status– Reset Password

• Retired– Discussion– Non-graded Assignments

• Many new or significantly updated Contrib Projects

Sakai 2.5 by the Numbers…

• Expanding Branch Management Team– Andrew Poland (Indiana University) is moving on– Anthony Whyte and Megan May– Stephen Marquard (UCT) and David Horwitz (UCT)– (?) Jason Shao (Rutgers)– [2.4.x - Stuart Freeman (Georgia Tech)]

Framework and Service Highlights• Content Review

– Minor changes in APIs and to integration with Assignments; only applicable to sites running a content review implementation (e.g., Turnitin).

• User Directory Service– Improved performance when retrieving provided users. – Support for login IDs (for Kerberos authentication, for example)

which differ from user EIDs. – Optional short-term authentication caching to greatly improve

DAV performance. – Can now enable or disable User Directory Provider

implementations via the sakai.properties file. – Reduced number of required methods in the User Directory

Provider interface.

Framework and Service Highlights

• Database– Addition of a faster lower memory footprint entity

parser based on SAX.– Addition of an optimized binary entity serialization.

• Memory Service (should be under framework)– Centralized management of Hibernate Cache

provision.– Replacement of MemoryService cache with ehcache

in preparation for cluster wide cache optimizations.– Upgrade to ehcache 1.3 to enable JMX capabilities.

Tool Highlights

• Many minor bug fixes and tweaks all around• By tool…

Tests & Quizzes (a.k.a. Samigo)• Promoted from Provisional to Core status.• Allow ability to move/copy/remove multiple questions to

other pools.• Allow ability to adjust score in edit assessment screen. • Allow ability to remove published assessments.• Add event logging for user operations.• Allow copying of all questions in a part to a selected pool.• Allow students' responses to be exported to Excel. • Allow point values of questions to be reset when a random

draw from pool part is created; all questions from the pool are copied to the part.

Help

• Support for help content in multiple languages.– No longer require restart?

• Added sakai.properties setting to hide help collections.

• Added tool registration property to register additional help collections.

• Updates to help content from Indiana University (IU) Knowledge Base for 2.5 functionality (as provided by project leads and IU KB team).

Citations Helper

• Import citations in RIS format from other tools such as RefWorks and Endnote.

• Sort citation lists by author, title, or date.• Search for and embed citations from within

the WYSIWYG Editor (FCKeditor); similar to Twin Peaks.

Messages and Forums

• MessageCenter previously split in2.4.• Messages– Ability to bulk Move and Delete Message. – Ability to forward Messages.

• Forums– Ability to delete forum messages.

• Added synoptic views for Home.

Poll

• Minor UI improvements:– rich text editor– date picker widget

• Improved data validation.

Chat Room

• Ability to delete all chat history for a given room.

OSP (Portfolios)

• Promoted from Provisional to Cores status.• New XSLT portal.• Aggregated View of Matrix and Portfolios.• Expanded sharing capabilities for Portfolios. • Many user interface bug fixes and

improvements. • Group-aware matrices.• Assignment references within Matrix/Wizards.

Portal

• Addition of site categorization.• Addition of tool categorization.• Improved experimental iFrame-less tool

presentation (a.k.a. PDA portal)

Schedule

• Performance improvements to reduce memory load of schedules with a large number of items.

• iCal subscription export service and import; reoccurring events are not yet supported. (ical.experimental=true)

Resources• Replaced dropdown widget for Add and Action menus with an

accessible one.• Improved performance by rewriting underlying Storage of entities

to reduce memory usage and CPU load, • Refactoring of database to eliminate bottlenecks in the underlying

content hosting service.• Preliminary support for the integration of JSR-170 repositories• Dropboxes

– Students and Instructors can now choose to email each other when they upload to a Dropbox.

– Instructors can now see a visual indication of which folders contain recently updated content.

– Removal of inappropriate options from Dropbox interface.

Section Info

• Download or print a roster list that provides each student's section memberships.

• Better enforcement of the maximum section size.

Roster

• New UI with a separate tabular view for profile and official institutional photos.

• Integration with Course Management API to display enrollment status information.

• Expanded permission scheme to retain the Roster's general use purpose while incorporating course-specific features.

• Significant performance improvements.

Provisional Projects

• Page Order Helper– Improved keyboard accessibility.– Added support for page grouping.

• Podcasts– Permissions now a reflection of permissions in

Resources.

Provisional Projects

• Linktool– Updated documentation. – Now deploy SakaiSigning.jws to webservices by

default.– Added placement id to list of parameters passed.– Support for specifying additional parameters in

the tool setup or URL.– Cleaned up tool formatting and validation.– Added new default verification script.

Provisional Projects

• Search– Addressed critical indexing errors for clusters with

a journaled indexer.– Reduced memory usage in indexers.

• Data Warehouse– Separated from OSP to realize its general

usefulness for reporting functionality.

Contrib Projects

• BlogWow– RSF-based blog tool.

• Evaluation System– Support formative evaluations by students in their

courses.

• Image Gallery– Allow a user to select a collection of images (a

gallery) and view the images in a specified order.

Contrib Projects

• MailArchiveWow– Performance improvements over current Mail

Archive.– Uses JSR-170 and RSF.

• Mneme– Assessment tool and service.

Contrib Projects

• OCW (Open CourseWare)– Adds support to Sakai for tagging and creating OCW

materials and sites.

• Conditional Release– Initial focus on “workflow” solution for Resources

and Gradebook.

• SiteStats– Show site statistics by user, event, or resource.

Contrib Projects

• OpenSyllabus– Create and publish model-based syllabi where

faculty can finely control resources available– Unified interface with a standardized vocabulary

• Sakai Groovy Shell• Sign-Up– Allows users to organize office hours, review

sessions, study groups and similar activities

Contrib Projects

• Q&A (Questions and Answers)– Enables students to ask questions anonymously.– Questions are ranked by their popularity and can

be organized into categories and tagged.• Roleplay– Adds support for user aliases.

• Wicket– A component set to facilitate the development of

Sakai tools using Apache Wicket.

Project-wide User Experience Highlights

• Accessibility– Outcomes from 2.4 accessibility review influenced

many changes and improvements for 2.5.

• Internationalization• “More” Tab• Tool Icons• PDA/iFrameless Portal

InternationalizationCurrent• Arabic • English/UK (new)• Catalan• Simplified Chinese (updated)• Dutch (updated)• French/France (new)• French/Canadian (updated)• Japanese (updated)• Korean (updated)• Russian (new)• Spanish (updated)• Swedish

Underway• Traditional Chinese• Danish• German• Hebrew• Mongolian• Portuguese• Slovakian• Turkish• Vietnamese

“More” Tab (Fluid Project)

Tool Icons

iFrame-less Accessible Portal(PDA Portal)

Try it out for yourself…

• Demo build coming with RC1• Download from SVN• QA and Nightly servers– QA Server List (http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/ZT8)

– Currently running 2.5.0-beta– Nightly Servers (2.5.x, trunk)

• While you’re there, why not help with QA?– Megan May, QA Director (mmmay@indiana.edu)

Looking Ahead…

• Sakai 2.5 Release– Beta (20 Nov 2007)– Final (12 Feb 2008)

• Follow and participate in release discussions– email lists; weekly on-line meetings• QA WG• Production WG

– “Whither the Release Schedule?” – Thurs 3:10pm• Conference Sessions…