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...