SakaiRenderPortlet
Andrew Petro
A JSR-168 portlet that renders Sakai content.
12 August 2005 email to Sakai-dev
I took a few days and wrote up a Sakai JSR-168 portlet. This portlet is a completely stock 168 portlet which has been tested in uPortal, Pluto, and GridSphere.
The portlet is a lot like the little Visual Basic tool I wrote. I describe it in some detail in the attached PowerPoint. It uses web- services to login to Sakai and retrieve a list of sites. Then it displays those sites using JSR-168. As the user navigates between sites, the JSR-168 portlet generates an embedded iFrame which includes the proper site. The nice thing about this approach is that every single Sakai tool works perfectly in the portal using this technique (Courier and everything just works).
We developed a simple web service which substitutes for forcing a single sign-on between the portal and Sakai. Using a shared secret and session based launching, the Portal can even direct Sakai to auto- create accounts based on the user information (name, email, etc) stored in the portal's directory.
I attach some Images, PowerPoint, and source code. I will move further discussion to the the "Portal" group on collab.sakaiproject.org but just wanted folks to know broadly what was up in case they wanted to join the group.
This is only the beginning. My PowerPoint alludes to future directions for the Portlet. Andrew Petro (Yale) has been doing some really good thinking about how to improve how we improve the portlet and move from a simple portlet to complete integration with uPortal navigation below:
/Chuck
P.S. Thanks to Marcus Christie of Indiana University for helping me figure this all out over the past few days.
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