The Sakai VRE Demonstrator Rob Crouchley, Adrian Fish and Miguel Gonzalez E-Science Centre, and Collaboratory for Quantitative e-Social Science, University of Lancaster Rob Allan and Xiaobo Yang E-Science Centre, CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory Mark Baker and Rahim Lakhoo Distributed Systems Group, University of Portsmouth Matthew Dovey, Stuart Yeates, Graham Kline and Francisco Pinto Research Technology Services, University of Oxford

Sakai Collaboration & Research/Learning Environment Portal Res 1 Discussion, Video Conf and VOIP Resource Discovery E-Collaboration Portlets Res 2Res 3Res 4 GE DBMS GE Statistical Analysis Quantitative Methods Portlets Res 5Res 6

Sakai Sakai is open source, it’s the hosting framework of choice for VLE and VRE development in the USA; Big investment from Mellon Foundation and Ivy League Universities ($6.8M); Close collaboration with uPortal developers Makes use of OKI OSIDs and latest Java technology The Sakai Tool Portability Profile (TPP) - Describes how to write tools and services so that they are portable across Sakai systems.

Sakai Roadmap Sakai basic collaborative system - suitable for small pilots (June 2004) Sakai basic collaborative learning system - suitable for significant pilot’s, (Dec 2004) Sakai collaborative learning system - suitable for significant production deployments, (June 2005), –2.1 release due Nov 2005 will have a WSRP producer. Sakai hardening, portal integration (WSRP & JSR-168), possible JSP and/or JYTHON

WP1b: Extending the Authentication Framework Security framework for VREs based on Shibboleth (Oxford perspective)

Web Services in Sakai Based on Axis 1.2 Release 2.0 includes sample PHP client Web Services Client Jakarta Axis Sakai APIs Sakai Kernel WS End Point

WP1c: Consuming Web Services Text Field to enter WSDL location Drop Down Menu for Services & Operations Buttons to Analyse and Add WS JTree for adding WS, with user interaction Display Message content for WS Operation Call Work by Asif Akram (Daresbury) using Swing. June 2005.

WSRP WSRP is now the key technology for linking Sakai tools into portals (Sakai currently only a WSRP producer but not consumer) WSRP consumers include uPortal, StringBeans, eXo Portal, Swing (WSRP4J) We want to consume a WSRP exported service (e.g. CREE) in Sakai.

Does Sakai Need Some Adapters? TPP adapter for WS –We can add a TPP layer to the WS interfaces generator already developed TPP adapter for WSRP –WSRP4J used to provide bridge from WSRP to JSR-168 TPP adapter for JSR168 –WSRP4J used to provide bridge from JSR168 to WSRP –We are evaluating which of these approaches would be the most feasible TPP adapter for Z35.50 and SRW –Work has been done in the CREE project which we are evaluating

If we had a WSRP Consumer TPP… WSRP Project-specific portal tools developed in JSR-168 Project-specific worksites in Sakai User’s aggregate view of his/ her projects

WSRP Image

WP2: So what Tools are we working with? Sakai Collaboration Tools Schedule Resources Web Content Chat Discussion New Sakai Tools LDQ Upload Whiteboard CopperCore IRC Wiki Audio Conferencing Resource Search CREE Information Tools JAFER GetRef HEIRPORT Google Grid Tools MDS LDAP Browser Grid Proxy Manager Grid Job Submission Grid Job monitor Grid FTP InfoPortal Other Portlets Narada Conferencing Semantic Search Grid Markets Tools Negociation Client Payment Service Client Data Management Tools SRB OGSA-DAI Service Registry UDDI publish/ discovery Dynamic WSDL Interface Support Tools Certificate Upload Desktop FTP

New Sakai VRE Tools : Demos Available from Lancaster CoE Booth during Coffee Breaks Blog Whiteboard Resource Searcher Audio and Video Conference Shared Display

Blog A blog is an online journal. They can be considered as limited online publishing systems. They are commonly used to store development notes and can be searched by anybody with access rights.

White Board The whiteboard is a distributed sketchpad and uses Narada Brokering to route drawing events to interested participants. Each authenticated worksite user can start sketching and will receive sketches from others.

Resource Searcher A simple, but effective, way of searching for documents amongst the resources attached to the current worksite.

Audio and Video Conference Worksite user's can create a conference (using the ConferenceService) and add participants from the pool of registered worksite users. The conference starts immediately and participants join as they login and start the tool. The conference tool uses RTP and applets to capture/playback audio and video. Uses ports>8000.

Shared Display With this tool, worksite users can work on a document collaboratively. One user acts as a producer of a display and simply drags a cursor over ANY desktop application they have running. The producer applet then starts capturing the application image and sending it to a JMS topic hosted on the Narada broker. Any other interested worksite users can then consume the display using the consumer applet. When used in conjunction with the audio tool the shared display can make collaborative editing (even programming) relatively painless.

WP3: Sakai Demonstrator and Services Production Server: Sakai 2.0 on IBM BladeCenter server at DL with Oracle 9i on NGS node at RAL. Moving to 2.1 with WSRP producer soon. Development: Sakai 1.51 or 2.0 with MySQL/Oracle at other sites. Dissemination and Status: Current Web site is at List of tools and status is at

WP4: Community, Evaluation and Support Community: 1.GROWL; Sakai VRE; CQeSS; NWGrid Tech Board; NWGrid Ops Board; ReDRESS Steering Committee; 2.NGS portal; Integrative Biology, e-HTPX; 3.ReDRESS portal developers and users; WSRP and portal framework evaluations. The sites have a total of around 140 users. We want to extend the Community, We are happy to offer guest accounts to anyone who would like to play with Sakai and the tools we have added, (come to the Lancaster CoE Booth)

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