Sakaidelic Musings

Firstly, just wanted to post a link to this entry about Blackboard: Blackboard Is Losing Customers, but What Does It Mean? Basically, its too early to tell anything yet, but its interesting nonetheless.

Now, I wanted to recap the current state of Resources in Sakai. I've actually been able to make it to two conference calls, so I feel pretty plugged in right now.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the core "Resources" tool in Sakai is a key area for improvement in user experience, and it's definitely an important issue for us at NYU. We have articulated it as something like "course material organization and presentation," and many new tools or approaches are currently in various stages of work. Here is a summary (especially useful as we approach the Newport Conference):

• regular Resources tool
• Resources Viewer aka Content Viewer
• Citations Helper
• POCS (new!)
• rWiki
• Melete
• some kind of possible JSR-170-based front end?
• a possible re-write of the Resources tool (possibly based on RSF), codename: ResourcesWOW!

So far, the things that seem the most interesting to me are Resources Viewer and Citations Helper. I was happy to hear that two of my three dealbreaker issues for Resources Viewer have been fixed, and that soon Resources Viewer will be able to handle content not strictly in Resources (like Assignments, etc.)

Also, it was interesting to hear a tiny bit about Mark Norton's POCS. It's interesting that some of these tools are defined by purely functional requirements (Resources Viewer, Citations Helper, rWiki) and others are more to satisfy a certain pedagogical approach (Melete, POCS). It's interesting (but not surprising) that I find the former more interesting.

In other news, the Resources WG will probably have a meeting in Newport on Friday, possibly sharing a half day with Fluid, but nothing is confirmed yet.

The Full Schedule for the conference has been posted.

Jason and I will be taking part in a Sakai Community Panel called "Sakai in your Backyard: Panel on Organizing Regional Sakai Events" on Wednesday, Dec 5th, in the Newport Coast room from 1:30 PM to 2:10 PM.

Other presentations that I am excited/curious to see:

Web Services in Sakai
Large Scale Sakai
Tips and Tricks with Spring and Sakai
Optimize Sakai Server - Java Memory, Performance and the Garbage Collector
Intro to the Sakai EntityBroker
Strategic Pragmatism for Running Sakai - A Technical Perspective
Sakai and Reporting - Exploring Approaches to Extracting Useful Information
Sakaibrary Project Update - Subject Research Guides

Please forgive me a UHF reference, but I was happy to have a certain mystery cleared up for me today in the Sakai 2.4 Production Performance Experiences panel. It was great to hear about everyone's experiences, since performance is always a huge concern for us. Lots of good information there, but there was also a good question about database connection pooling.

Recently on the dev list, people have been suggesting c3p0 for connection pooling (as opposed to the default dbcp) as cure-all for your (possible) performance woes. However, I wondered what specifically could be gained by moving to c3p0. When Jason mentioned that they had made the switch at Rutgers, and I asked him what made c3p0 better, he told me that he didn't know, but it seemed like a good idea (or something to that extent).

Today I learned that there really isn't a difference per se (at least in terms of performance gains). This issue that schools were dealing with was a "deadlock" where threads were waiting for connections to be made available to them. Indiana switched to c3p0 to fix this problem, but UMich just tuned off "evictions" and "didn't let the pool cycle", which seemed to achieve the same thing with dbcp. Apparently, c3p0 just has better default settings for this, so this may be why people saw performance gains using it.

Although I'm sure there were a few people that wanted to show up that couldn't, the BOF for developers (and other technical folks) of the female persuasion went off fairly well. I met some really great people, and we had a great discussion about our experiences both in the Sakai community as well as in the technology community in general. I'm glad we put the topic out there in the Sakai community, and I've had some interesting discussions with many people (male and female) about the diversity of the Sakai developer community. Below I've included a list of our participants, and if wanted to come, but couldn't, just let me know, and I'll add your name to the list (for future discussion and possible events, etc).