Over time, more and more tools and services are included within Sakai. Therefore, there is an ever-expanding set of data, such as courses, users, polls, forums, grade books, assessments, and new data structures, available for integration.
It would indeed be handy if instead of needing to write custom web services per new entity, a tool programmer could call a service, write, and register his or her data for exposure. The kernel would then become responsible for the end delivery and the RESTful web services. Because the programmer does not have to deal as much with the details as before the services existed, the structure reduces the duplication of code and effort. This also increases maintainability, quality, and scalability, and generally eases the programmer's burden. Further, if by default, the entities are exposed as MIME types HTML, JSON, XML, you can write rich web-based applications and widget sets that consume the JSON and XML formats from the data within Sakai.
The...