Introduction
OpenSyllabus offers the possibility to integrate different Sakai tools by providing a minimum interface and link. The interface allows creating or modifying references to the tool and the link gives access to the tool. We have already done an integration with Assignment tool and we are working on Citations List.
Philosophy
The principles underlying the integration of the Sakai's tool are as follows.
- Choose bare minimal functionalities necessary to develop the tool on the client side
The Osyl Client has been developed to offer a minimal support for the original Sakai's tool.
We do not have to reinvent the wheel and develop again all the user-interface for each tool to be integrated with OpenSyllabus.
Currently, the Osyl-Client only takes into account the following infos :- Title
- Short description
- Open Date
- Close Date
- Notification
- Allow to link to an already existent Assignment from the Sakai's server
- Allow to create a small stub into the Sakai's server side
- Let more complicated things to the server-side and the original user-interface
The Osyl Client offers the possibility to create an assignment, link an existing assignment to the course outline and modify the minimal informations. - Let's final deleting or suppression to the server side
Just clean the course plan or replace the deleted ressources with dummy things on the client-side.
Let's the user or the admin responsible to clean the database. - Perform synchonization at the opening and closing of the session
Limits
With this sort of integration, synchronization and integrity of the data between the client side (GWT) and the server side (Sakai) are always a source of problems.
We try to synchronize the data as soon as possible but it could represent problems of too many server access.