[Sakai SEPP] Ken Winer - uPortal

I'm at the first Sakai Educational Partners Program meeting in Denver.

Ken WIner is talking about uPortal and it's relationship with Sakai.

uPortal is the open source portal software that is a project born from the Java Architectures Special Interest Group (JA-SIG). uPortal began in December 1999 and has a lot of traction in the higher ed community (over 130 implementing organizations in at least 13 countries).

Two emerging standards for portlets (portal channels) - JSR168 (a java community process) and WSRP (a web services approach).

WSRP is a presentation-oriented web service - once you get the SOAP message back from the web service it already contains markup so it can be thrown right to the screen.

You can imagine uPortal acting as a WSRP consumer or producer. It allows the portal to communicate with other applications across heterogeneous technologies.

Pluto is the Apache project that is a portlet container, that is used in uPortal. In uPortal 2.3 (the current release) you have to use a "Portlet Adapter Channel" in uPortal.

SAKAI has thre different versions of interaction with uPortal:

- Embedded - Sakai runs as a portlet within a stock uPortal
- Injected - Sakai tools run as individual channels within a modified version of uPortal
- Integrated - Sakai tools able to run as inter-communicating processes within a future stock version of uPortal.