Overview (2.7)

Current Release: Sakai 2.7.1 (released 25 August 2010)

Sakai 2.7.1 addresses over 100 issues that enhance stability, performance and security in the 2.7 series. Sakai 2.7.1 relies on core service updates provided in the recent Sakai kernel (K1) 1.1.9 maintenance release.

Dedication

Steve Sakai 2.7 is dedicated to the memory of Steve Smail, Programmer/Analyst in Library Information Technology at Indiana University, who died in late December 2009. He was a respected and long-time member of the Sakai developer community; many knew him through his work on the Sakaibrary project, Citations Helper and previous library resource integration efforts as well as his regular participation at Sakai conferences.

Documentation hints

Icons are used throughout the release documentation to highlight important points in the installation, configuration, build and deployment process. Below is a list of the icons you will encounter:

(tick) Hints
(info) Useful Information
(warning) Caution
(minus) Warning
(thumbs up) Good practice
(thumbs down) Bad practice

Sakai 2.7 Distribution Packages

There are two ways to acquire Sakai source code. You can choose to download a packaged *.zip or *tar.gz file from Sakai's release page or check out the code directly from our code repository using Subversion's (SVN) source control management system.

Demo

The Sakai Demo is a pre-built version of Sakai with Apache Tomcat and a simple configuration, perfect for a quick and easy demo of Sakai. The demo is NOT intended for large scale implementations. It is suitable only for evaluating the software and running small pilot implementations on a single server.

Binary

The Sakai Binary is a pre-built version of Sakai without Apache Tomcat, jar dependencies, or extra configuration files. Download the Binary release if you want to just drop the Sakai bundle into a pre-existing Tomcat environment.

Source

The Sakai Source includes Sakai portal, tool and service source code. Start from Source if you plan to make any code-level changes to your Sakai system.


Sakai 2.7 Source Code

Sakai source code can also be checked out anonymously from our SVN repository. The latest development work is located in /trunk; stable releases can be found in /tags while maintenance, experimental and other work are performed in /branches.

Starting with Sakai 2.7, Sakai common services (e.g., authz, content, event, site, tool, user, etc.) have been repackaged and refactored as the Sakai Kernel (K1). In most cases, you will never have to check out the kernel manually as Sakai 2.7 kernel dependencies are managed by Maven.

To checkout a stable Sakai 2.7.1 release tag, for example, issue the following svn command from the terminal:

svn co https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/sakai/tags/sakai-2.7.1/ sakai-2.7.1

Sakai 2-7-x Maintenance Branch

The latest bug fixes for a particular release can be found in our maintenance branches. Please note that certain maintenance branch fixes require database schema changes; see the Sakai Confluence Wiki 2-6-x branch summary for more information. You can check out the maintenance branch by issuing the following command from the terminal:

svn co https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/sakai/branches/sakai-2.7.x/ sakai_2.7.x

Upgrading from a Previous Release

Upgrade from an earlier version of Sakai usually involves a database conversion (for which scripts are supplied with the release), an update to custom skins and possibly changes to any custom code. See the "Upgrade" tab for more details.

Older Releases

With the advent of the Sakai 2.7 series in June 2010, official Community support for Sakai 2.5 ceased. Organizations running Sakai 2.5 (or earlier versions) are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the latest versions of Sakai 2.6 or 2.7 in order to take advantage of continued maintenance support.

Comments, Feedback

The documentation is presented here for ongoing comment, correction, and clarification, so please use the "Add Comment" link at the bottom of any of these pages if you note errors, require further details or have tips to share.