Sakai gets JSR-170 support; possible integration point with FEDORA?

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Earlier this year, I was on a quest to hook a FEDORA content repository into the Sakai collaboration and learning environment. What looked at first to be a fairly easy integration turned out to be rather complicated and I set the project aside for another time. Today brings word from Ian Boston of a JSR-170 implementation in Sakai:

During the Summer of 2006, I did a JSR-170 Implementation of ContentHostingService as a prototype against the then Trunk 2.2 ContentHostingService. The implementation took the ContentHostingService API and re-implemented it using JSR-170 under the covers. It was done in in such a way as to allow JSR-170 clients (eg WebDAV implementations) to use the JSR-170 API directly and still obey the Sakai AuthZ implementation.

JSR-170 - Project: Resources - Sakai Confluence

JSR 170, as you might recall, is the "specification for a Java platform API for accessing content repositories in a uniform manner." "JSR-170," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_repository_API_for_Java?oldid=84044565 (accessed November 8, 2006) What makes this implementation most interesting, I think, is Ian's last sentence — using a WebDAV implementation to speak directly to the JSR-170 content repository while taking into account the AuthZ settings in Sakai.

Now we need a JSR-170 implementation on top of FEDORA to complete the pairing. We'd want Sakai's AuthZ settings to be reflected in FEDORA's XACML rules, of course, the the mind boggles a bit about how to get this done, but hopefully we can get back to it again soon and see if we can make it work.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.tfd.co.uk/blogs/sakaiblog/ to http://blog.tfd.co.uk/ on January 19th, 2011.