Several have asked, off list, about the relationship between uPortal and Sakai. I thought more of you may be interested. This excerpt from my October 31st Report to the JA-SIG Board (a public document sharing with our commercial partners) describes the status:

Sakai Chief Architect Chuck Severance described the architectural direction of Sakai development at the August 2004 uPortal Developers' Meeting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In his minutes of the meeting, Mike Oltz reported Sakai Project's Chuck Severance, saying: "It was decided that instead of JSR-168, WSRP ("Web Services for Remote Portlets") needs more emphasis in the Sakai code."

On October 29, 2004, Chuck Severance wrote:

"Version 1.5 of the Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment, to be delivered sometime after December 2004, will use iframes and will have been tested using uPortal 2.4. Version 2.0 will use WSRP. Any compliant WSRP Consumer is sufficient to render Sakai CLE (Collaborative Learning Environment). The Sakai Architecture Team is considering other alternates to integrate Sakai tools into the uPortal environment; this information will be shared with the portal community Spring 2005."

The report continues:

The Sakai Project is developing three Sakai tools—assignment and assessment being developed jointly by Stanford and Indiana, grade book by the University of California, Berkeley, and an authoring tool by Foothill De Anza Community College District, that could be developed as portlets running in uPortal separate from the Sakai CLE. This alternative architecture has not been discussed by the Sakai Project teams.

In addition, a copy of Chuck's recent presentation on uPortal is attached. Note the implicit timelines; this effects uPortal version 3.0.

I believe the message in short is: Patience, convergence is happening deliberately, slowly, and continuously.

jim farmer