Does Sakai have the ability for plugins?

Question

The company I currently work for builds enterprise software for educational facilities. I just finished a plugin for one of their products that integrates it into Moodle. This was simple and quick because all I had to do was create the source code and then bundle it up into a .zip.

Now they are coming to me wanting me to do the same thing for facilities using Sakai. I have realized that Sakai is basically compiled java running on a server.. yet am wondering if it has any plugin based or modification system I can utilize to integrate our product into it?

Also thanks in advance. :)

Gopherwood

Answer 1

Sakai has 2 main methods for developing a new plugin (also sometimes called a tool).

1. LTI (1.0 and 2.0) - Sakai 10 supports the IMS LTI 1 and 2 specifications (it is the first LMS to have support for both). Older versions of Sakai (2.7 or newer) support LTI 1.0. This standard allows development of a tool which runs on it's own server but integrates with the learning system via a launching protocol.
2. Sakai tool webapp - Any Java webapp can be integrated into Sakai as a tool by adding a meta file (tool.xml), adding some parts to the web.xml, and optionally loading CSS/JS in the header and using Java APIs to access the Sakai kernel. More details about that are available in the Sakai wiki: https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/BOOT/Sakai+Programmer+Manual

Ensconce

Thank you very much. I was able to implement an LTI 1.1 tool that did as was required. Hadn't heard of the Sakai tools either, interesting. – Gopherwood

Sakai was designed to be a collection of tools, all real work is done in tools, and tools are essentially plugins. Despite this architecture, Sakai still comes across as a monolithic my-way-or-the-highway application. – Jeffreyjeffreys

Answer 2

In addition to the "tool plugins" mentioned by Zach above, Sakai also supports extensions to authentication via the UserDirectoryProvider API. Most of the common authentication methods (password, Shibboleth, LDAP, Active Directory, CAS) are already supported, but custom ones are not that difficult to write as well.

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