Building Sakai (a.k.a. sakai-dev)

The Building Sakai area is oriented towards the needs of designers, programmers, developers, and quality assurance members of the Sakai community. It encompasses a broad range of topics, including documenting, designing, developing, testing, and releasing Sakai. You will find information here on best practices for the design and development of tools and services, documentation on integration and migration, technical specifications for components of projects, plans for future releases, etc.

In addition to this area in Confluence, there is also an email list for discussing topics and asking questions related to building Sakai: sakai-dev@collab.sakaiproject.org (join sakai-dev list.) This is a very active list, with several or more messages a day (sakai-dev list archive).

Related Working Groups
Work in Progress
Proposals for Discussion
Ideas and Concepts
Developer Documentation
Sakai 3
Kernel
Development Infrastructure (and how to get access or report problems )
- Sakai Source Code Repository (Subversion)
- mSub - Deployment Source Code Repository
- Issue and bug tracking (Jira)
- Sakai wiki. You've already found it.
- Having trouble with any of these? See Sakai Development Infrastructure.

List of All Confluence Spaces

Related Working Groups

There are also a number of smaller Working Groups that deal with specific topics within the broader context of Building Sakai, some of which overlap into Deploying Sakai and Using Sakai:

Work in Progress

These are mini projects and efforts which are being worked on, they are too small to need their own space but something worth sharing with the community, feel free to link to other spaces if you like, remove your stuff from here once it is completed or if it becomes inactive

Sakai 3 - Initial thoughts on Sakai 3.0 from...
Kernel - Sakai's kernel services
Sakai MessageService - Exposes JMS API based service that uses ActiveMQ
JMS Event Service - Plans to replace the event service with a JMS event service
Sakai Cluster-wide Caching - Efforts to have a cluster wide cache in Sakai that supports expiration and replication
Workflow - gathering requirements around the various workflow needs in Sakai, and information on 3rd-party solutions
Content Authoring - designing and building a generic content authoring tool for Sakai
TurnItIn Integration - requirements gathering for improving TurnItIn integration with Sakai

Proposals for Discussion

This is a place to post your proposals related to Sakai and Sakai development, please feel free to create a page and link to it here.

Component Manager Upgrade - Plan for upgrading the component manager to bring into line with industry standards - also to enable hot deploy

Ideas and Concepts

This is a place to post your ideas or concepts related to Sakai and Sakai development, please feel free to create a page and link to it here.

Portal Active Zones - Plans to add in zones to the portal which can have html fragments placed into them
Hierarchy Service - A service to handle general hierarchy storage in Sakai
Permissions Token Generator - A key token generator for handling storage and lookup of permissions based on token keys
Sakai Easy Tools - Plans for making simple pluggable tools in Sakai which are super easy to write but have an upward migration path
Recent Activity Service - Plans for how a recent activity service might be constructed in Sakai
Distributed Version Control - Plans/Discussion of moving from SVN to a distributed vc system

Developer Documentation

Most of the development docs are in the Programmers Cafe Space and are linked to in the Programmers Manual but helpful docs can and should be added here as well.

Programming Best Practices - Best practices for writing code in Sakai
Sakai Developer Practices - describes trunk/branch/patch management, developer etiquette and the mechanics of technical decision-making
Best Practices for Javascript - offers tips on writing good javascript and widgets in Sakai
Release Practice Guidelines - How Sakai releases are assembled and maintained
Entity Provider and Broker - Sakai entity system enhancement and potential replacement for the legacy entity producers/entities
Best Practices for High Quality Code - offers tips on ensuring you are writing high quality code for Sakai (and Java in general)
Automated Testing in Sakai - overview of test development approaches with pointers to examples and supporting technology
Helpers and Gadgets within Sakai - analyses the role of "helpers" or reusable fine-grained UI elements in general within Sakai
URLs within Sakai - categorisation of the various kinds of URLs that are in use in Sakai, pointers to documentation and commentary on possible directions
Writing and using SuperHelpers within Sakai - how to write a "new"-style helper using RSF, AHAH and the EntityBroker
Using Caching in Sakai - explains how to properly cache objects in Sakai
Lighter-weight Sakai development
Set up multiple Sakai versions - how to set up multiple sakai versions for your desktop
Course Management - how to use Course Management* Course Management - how to use Course Management
Future Proofing Sakai 2 Tools - Tips on writing Sakai 2 tools with Sakai 3 in mind

Specific to Sakai 2.x and Kernel 1.x

Test Runner - A package for running programmatic tests (load, data validation, migration, etc.) inside Sakai.
JCR Integration - Java Content Repository integration documentation for Sakai 2.x/Kernel 1.x; a entirely different approach is being used in Kernel 2.x.