Sakai Maven Archetype

I am very proud to announce that the Sakai Maven Archetype 1.0 is now available!

This is a new way to get up and running with a complete Sakai tool (webapp, API, components). The tool is based on Wicket 1.4.17 which integrates nicely with Sakai. This first release is a basic tool, only a couple of pages that don’t do a lot, but it does demonstrate how to get a Sakai tool styled, internationalised and registered, setup your own APIs, wire them up with Spring and inject them via annotations. It could easily be used as a base for a real tool.

To getup and running, simply type:

mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=org.sakaiproject.maven-archetype -DarchetypeArtifactId=sakai-maven-archetype -DarchetypeVersion=1.0 -DarchetypeRepository=https://source.sakaiproject.org/maven2/


And follow the prompts to set up your project.

Future versions will include a help bundle that registers with the Sakai help system, assemblies for indie releases and Spring JDBC for some backend work.

What’s new in Profile2 1.4

With the release of Sakai 2.8 back in April, here’s an update on what you’ll find in the latest release of Profile2 – included with Sakai 2.8.

Private messaging

Users can send private messages to their connections. This is a threaded discussion so you can keep the conversation going.

Pictures gallery

Users can upload images to a “Pictures” gallery and display the images on their profile page.

Official photos

If your institution provides official photos for users, they can be configured as the default. You can also continueto allow your users to choose their own, or switch between the two.

Kudos

A new “Kudos” feature calculates a daily score for profile use, based on status updates, information provided, and other measurements. Users can choose to display their scores in their profiles. This needs a bit of setup from your System Administrator (to activate the process that calculates your score) to if you can’t see your kudos, get in touch with them.

In addition, the profile page has been reorganised, with separate categories for “staff” and “student” information, as well as a new “social networking” category where users can provide links to a variety of social networking sites.

There are lots of under the hood improvements as well. There is a comprehensive Java API  that other tools and services can use to get access to the profile data. The RESTful API has also been updated to provide better support for client side and mobile applications. And a bunch of caches have been added to improve performance.

Lots more is happening in this space for upcoming releases. Stay tuned.