Note
Ray Davis began contributing to Sakai during the development of Sakai 1.5. He is currently employed by the University of California, Berkeley.
Since the initial release of Sakai CLE 1.0, Sakai services and tools have dramatically improved in functionality, stability, and performance. Meanwhile, Sakai's architectural foundations and constraints have remained essentially unchanged. In late 2007, project veterans began reviewing more powerful and more standard approaches to componentization. A few months later, a team based at Cambridge University experimented with a radical redesign of the Sakai 2 user experience to better support social networking and simplify common administrative processes. These threads combined in an ambitious new project whose contributors span the globe: the Sakai Open Application Environment, or Sakai OAE.
Apart from the use of Java, the technical foundations of Sakai OAE represent a sharp break from Sakai CLE 1 and CLE 2. The OAE initially represented...