Creative Commons Attribution- ShareAlike 2.5 License Sakai Programmer's Café Sakai Oxford Tetra ELF Workshop Comparative Display Technologies in Sakai Aaron Zeckoski

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3 What technologies work Virtually any Java related display technology can work in Sakai The caveat is that Sakai uses a special servlet to handle redirects and processing of http request variables –This can make it a bit tougher to use things so you are better off sticking with the ones that currently work

4 What games are there in town? JSF But there are a few things to remember…

5 Java Servlets Tried and tested technology Works fine in Sakai –Café Servlet Hello World sample codeCafé Servlet Hello World sample code But why would you want to write servlets anymore considering the many better options out there? Bottomline: Don’t use this unless you just want to put an existing servlet app into Sakai

6 Velocity Templates Uses “references” to place dynamic content in html pages with special # or $ vars –Somewhat similar to PHP or JSP Used in the majority of current Sakai apps The current velocity implementation in Sakai is a custom and out of date version Bottomline: You are better off not using this, only use this if you have existing apps and cannot rewrite them

7 Java Server Pages Mixes code and html together –Poor separation of code and UI design –Scripted programming language Used in Rwiki (sorta), XML version JSP support is available via a cool servlet by Andrew Thornton (Cambridge) Bottomline: Use this if you have existing JSP code, but go for options that provider better separation for new code

8 Java Server Faces A set of APIs and custom taglibs that integrates well with J2EE –Pretty heavyweight and has problems –Poor separation of UI design and code –High learning curve The second most used display technology in Sakai Integrates well with Sakai –better than any of the other current solutions Bottomline: Don’t use this unless you really have to, even if you have existing code

9 Reasonable Server Faces Spring based web programming framework –Pure XHTML templating, clean separation –Lightweight and pure bean programming –Works well with AJAX and Javascript Not used in Sakai yet but is fully functional in it and integrates somewhat –Integration and features are improving daily Bottomline: Use of this is recommended for new Sakai apps