Sakai OAE native mobile app

First of all, I would like to introduce myself, I am Mayte Giménez a student of Computer Science and Fine Arts from Spain. I am doing my specialization in languages and artificial intelligence. I have been working with Sakai for the last 3 years as scholar with David Roldán (recently named fellow, big kudos for him!), and Sakai gave me this big opportunity to develop a mobile application for Sakai OAE.

Before I will start talking about the project, I would like to say how impress I am about the big work the community have done with this branch of Sakai. The architecture is really strong and all technologies used are awesome.

So, let's talk about the GSoC project!
During this summer, I will develop, with the big help of Carl Hall, a mobile application for Sakai OAE. After research our different options, we are going to develop a native application for the main mobile platforms: Android and iOS. So I will be switching from one environment to the other every week.
Since Sakai OAE services returns JSON we can take advantage from native application, specially with the Android background services. (I still have to investigate with iOS, any help?)

I have created some mock ups about how the application should look like. These are my two proposals:


Mockup 1:

• Login window
• If login is correct we arrive to my dashboard, where we can select where to go. If the user selects "My membership" he will get a list of places where he can access and when he selects one site he will see the information about this site.
• If the user selects "My profile" he will see his profile and he could edit it.












Mockup 2:


• Login window
• If login is correct we arrive to my dashboard, where the user will see some tabs with all the basics of sakai oae. First tab will be the profile, and he will be able to edit his profile. If the user selects "My membership" tab he will get a list of places where he can access and when he selects one site he will see the information about this site.
• If the user is at "My profile", and he press a button (in Android: menu button, in iOs I should investigate which one will be better) he will see all the options of his profile and he could change the view.









I would love to have some feed back about these. So please comment! :)

Quite big for a short introduction, isn’t it? Well I won’t bore you much more.

I have began with the configuration screen on the android environment, so I will post soon about it.




Thanks for reading. Please, comment. And we see us soon.

Improve Sakai CLE WebDav Support

Hello,I am Manoj Inukolunu a 4th year student(graduated) from Bits-Pilani Goa, India.

My project is to rewrite the existing sakai CLE webdav code for better maintainability using Milton.

• My mentors are Seth Theriault and Anthony White.
• The Confluence page is at https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/DAV/Home
• SVN branch is at https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/dav/branches/SAK-20607/
• Bug tracker is at https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-20607

Milton is a great choice because its open source,it has great support(the mailing list and the author of milton are very helpful).The main problem with the existing code is maintainability due to its large size. All the code is written in a single class and its pretty old based on an older tomcat version.

with milton we dont have to worry about maintenance as it handles all the bookkeeping .We only have to implement the interfaces for the functionality.milton is agnostic about the nature of the data.

From my understanding I created 4 classes SakaiFolderResource which implements the FolderResource(com.bradmcevoy.http.FolderResource) SakaiFileResource which implements the FileResource(com.bradmcevoy.http.FileResource) and SakaResourceFactoryImpl which implements the ResourceFactory(com.bradmcevoy.http.ResourceFactory) and a helper class SakaiDavHelper for code re-usability.

Finally the best place for ideas is the confluence page and I can always be reached at manoj0011989@gmail.com for any query's

Cross Platform Mobile Application for Sakai CLE

First, I would like to introduce myself. I am Kasun Lakpriya Hettige from Sri Lanka, following a computer science and engineering degree in University of Moratuwa. I am willing to do my higher studies in Software Engineering field.

For those who are not heard of the project here are few links:

• Idea by Steve Swinsberg: https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/MGT/Google+Summer+of+Code+2011+ideas+list#GoogleSummerofCode2011ideaslist-
• Confluence space for app: https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CLEMBL/Home

Idea of this project is to build an mobile application for Sakai CLE to use in many kinds of mobile platforms like Android, iOS, BlackBerry and etc. For this we are using a cross platform library called phoneGap. More details about phoneGap http://www.phonegap.com/.

Tools and technologies

Though the app is going to be ported with different platforms due to some limitations I am developing for Android to test in emulators. Here are my working environment details:

• Eclipse (3.5 or higher)
• Android SDK
• ADT plug-in

• JQuery mobile - http://jquerymobile.com/

• MDS AppLaud 1.2 PhoneGap for Android plug-in - This is optional but useful due to its inbuilt,

• phoneGap support
• HTML, JS and CSS project support
• Touch-Optimized UI frame support for popular jQuery mobile and Sencha Touch JS libraries at the moment
• All in one support is a big plus for me

NOTE: To use AppLaud you need Eclipse Helios.

As discussed with mentor I will be moving forward with jQuery mobile for now. Here are few screens of the app. 

Your ideas, comments are welcome all the time and will really helpful to come up with a nice product. And the best place to collaborate and to get more information about the project would be the above mentioned confluence space. I will be posting here with the progress and the things I will get to know in the meantime. So I hope that anybody who is willing develop mobile apps using these technologies will find this interesting.

Thanking Charith for helping hand with Photoshop and Avinash for some sample screens! :-) 

Sakai Fellows 2011 announced

Carl Hall has just been made a Sakai Fellow for "exceptional contributions to the community".  Congratulations Carl!

Impressively for our 2011 Sakai GSoC projects, I'm pretty sure Carl's elevation means that all five of our mentors are Sakai Fellows.  You can't buy training like that..

Brief bios of the 2011 Fellows can be found at  http://www.sakaiproject.org/sakai-fellows

Largest ever number of students accepted!

Huge congratulations to all FOUR of our successful applicants, all of whom impressed our mentors with their combination of skill, experience, enthusiasm and ideas.

Mai Giménez: Sakai OAE native mobile app

• Mentor: Carl Hall (Hallway Technologies)
• Mai is a final year student of computer science at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain.  Mai is a great communicator and is actually returning from a related project in Sakai CLE last year so will be hitting the ground running.



Kasun Lakpriya: Sakai CLE mobile app


• Mentor: Steve Swinsburg
 (Australian National University)
• Kasun is a final year student at the University of Moratuwa, following a computer science and engineering degree. Kasun is massively enthusiastic about this project and has the distinction of being our first GSoC student from Sri Lanka.


Aadish Kotwal: Sakai OAE Column Storage Driver


• Mentor: Ian Boston (University of Cambridge)
• Aadish impressed us immensely with his pre-application research and is probably ready to get started right now.  He is a fourth-year Computer Engineering student at the University of Mumbai, India. 

Manoj Inukolunu: Improve Sakai CLE WebDAV support

• Mentors: Anthony Whyte (University of Michigan) and Seth Theriault (Columbia University)
• A fourth-year CS student at Birla Institute Of Technology and Sciences (BITS), Pilani, Goa, Manoj is also returning from last year.  This time around though he couldn't have a more different project, or one with a better chance of wide deployment.  We're counting on you, Manoj!

Big kudos to all our other applicants also - several of the projects this year had more than one outstanding application and it really wasn't easy for us to choose.  Four slots is what Google have given us though and we're really grateful for all four of them, especially as that's the most slots ever for Sakai.  

Between now and May 23rd the students will be getting to know the Sakai project and community and talking to their mentors to flesh out their plans and prepare for the main project phase.  These projects aren't just fixing bugs; they're breaking new ground with improved and extended functionality.  It won't be enough simply to write code - the students will have to produce code which is useful and maintainable enough that others will take it on even when GSoC is over, as users and as maintainers. It's no mean challenge and they'll need to draw heavily on their mentors' experience to be successful.

So that everyone can see how they're getting on I'll be asking the students (and mentors!) to post updates here, starting with introductions, but expect to see them in JIRA, Confluence, IRC and the mailing lists as well.

Feedback from our 2011 application process

I asked members of our Google Group for feedback on our application process.

First off, students really appreciated the responsiveness of mentors, on the group and directly.  This year we've tried to keep as many of the early discussions on the group as possible so they can help other applicants and take the place of a FAQ.

An outstanding suggestion we will be using is to have successful candidates blog getting started with Sakai and its large codebase, to help future GSoC students and the official community 'getting started' guides too.

Future ideas on the ideas page will have associated Jira tickets (bugs/issues/tasks) wherever possible, or discussion pages where that makes more sense.

We'll also encourage mentors to include 'initial assignments' that can serve to introduce the project for accepted candidates during the socialisation period and give applicants a way to show their skills - it's a neat and constructive way of having a 'coding challenge' element which is popular in many other orgs.

I think we'll also be trying to streamline the whole application process and make it less intimidating. We've had fewer applications per project this year than last (so far anyway - applications are still open) so it probably needs to be more exciting and more accessible. Between the blog, Google group, ideas page and Melange page there's a lot of information to take in, and that's before even starting on the Sakai community pages.

Kudos to Kasun Lakpriya, Nandana Mihindukulasooriya, Avinash Parida and Aadish Kotwal for their terrific feedback.    

Student Application deadline approaching!

Friday is the last day to get in your applications!

If you're interested in any of Sakai's six absolutely great projects now's the time to make tracks to our application template and start asking questions.  We'll try our best to answer quickly and even give you feedback on your application.  When you're ready, submit your application via Melange.

Here they are again for you:

1. Sakai CLE mobile app
2. Improve Sakai CLE WebDAV support
3. Sakai OAE native mobile app
4. Sakai OAE Column Storage Driver
5. Integrate Luke as a Felix Web Console Plugin
6. Implement Social API interfaces of OpenSocial

We've had interest up and down the list but it's fair to say number 1 is proving popular, while 2, 5 and 6 are still completely open fields application wise. 

Why are these great projects you should seriously be applying for?  First and foremost, the project mentors are all professional developers and ninjas - you can't buy this sort of training.  Second, these are all tremendously valuable projects to Sakai and using interesting and up to date technologies.  WebDAV support is practically guaranteed to be used by tens of thousands of people - think about having that to boast of on your resume.  Building a management interface using Luke and Felix for key Apache Solr-powered search functionality, in a highly modular software environment using many cutting-edge OSS projects, is a classic piece of CV-enhancing development which will get you experience in search and many other technologies.  Implementing OpenSocial APIs for Sakai OAE is a key part of Sakai's open and social vision and not only introduces you to social technologies but API-building in general.

You know you want this - now get on your bike and apply!