Book Image

Sakai CLE Courseware Management: The Official Guide

Book Image

Sakai CLE Courseware Management: The Official Guide

Overview of this book

Sakai is a Collaboration and Learning environment that provides the means to manage users, courses, instructors, and facilities, as well as a spectrum of tools including assessment, grading, and messaging. Sakai is loaded with many handy features and tools, which make it uniquely the Learning system of the present as well as the future.This book is the officially endorsed Sakai guide and is an update to the previous book, Sakai Courseware Management: The Official Guide. From setting up and running Sakai for the first time to creatively using its tools and features, this book delivers everything you need to know.Written by Alan Berg, a Sakai fellow and former Quality Assurance Director of the Sakai Foundation and Ian Dolphin the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation with significant contributions from the Sakai community, Sakai CLE Courseware Management: The Official Guide is a comprehensive study of how Sakai CLE should be used, managed, and maintained, with real world examples and practical explanations.The book opens with an overview of Sakai, its history and how to set up a demonstration version. Next, the underlying structures and tools are described. In using Sakai for Teaching and Collaboration, there is a detailed discussion of how to structure online courses for teaching and collaboration between groups of students, from creating course sites to understanding their use in different organizations around the world.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Sakai CLE Courseware Management
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Terminology
Index

Chapter 10. Web Services: Connecting to the Enterprise

From the very beginning, it was clear that in order to work in universities, Sakai needed to scale to support hundreds of thousands of users. With the requirements changing and evolving, and the ever-increasing user expectations, Sakai had to be able to connect with a multitude of external systems. When Sakai was first designed, the specifics of the majority of the connected systems were not knowable. To adapt to these tough circumstances, Sakai supplies web services that are easy to hook into or write. Sakai exposes services for creating and maintaining users, sites, and groups. These services are easily extensible to include any part of the Sakai framework.

This advanced chapter explains the two main types of web service, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Representational State Transfer (REST) (http://microformats.org/wiki/rest). It also covers the already-existing web services and describes how to hook into them. If you follow...