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

Sakai and SOAP


Sakai SOAP web services piggyback on top of the Apache Axis project. Creating basic Sakai web services is programmer-friendly because Apache Axis removes many of the hard chores. All you have to do is create a Java class in a text file under the /web-apps/sakai-axis directory, and any public method is automatically compiled into a service with a WSDL file automatically generated for it, ready for discovery by the client program. The compilation of the web service occurs after creation or modification and is triggered by the next incoming request. Helpfully, when you make a typo or any other mistake, the server displays the compilation error as a web page at the URL of the broken service, as shown in the next screenshot. You'll notice that the line number and type of error are included. The combination of text processing with a rich set of services to call on, plus the fact that it is not necessary to restart the server every time you compile, makes for rapid development cycles...