Ian’s talking about plug-able back-end implementations for ContentHosting and the Resources tool. Looks like a VFS type layer that should support adding arbitrary backing stores – the example he gave was DSpace, but people are talking about other stores like AFS, iTunes, etc.
One of the comments that’s come up during the discussion is how do you integrate various backing stores disparate permission models, capabilities, etc. Translating things like ACLs, metadata, etc. into different backing stores seems problematical. Possibly some kind of UI extension point supporting store specific interfaces is being discussed asa possible solution.
SCORM implemented a Zip file handler, allows you to navigate, serve out, etc. Seems to be the defacto example of how to write a ContentHostingHandler.
Hmmm… Customizing the Resources tool – talking about ways to define custom behaviors within the Resources tool/FilePicker, and others. OSP, Citations, SCORM, others. `ResourcesType` = allows people to define actions supported by a resource, labels, icons, metadata, others. Types are loaded at startup and added to a `ResourceTypeRegistry`.
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Code-walk through of various classes and interfaces for implementing Handlers. Also talk about OSP integration, and how that was done to integrate Forms with Resources. Since the example OSP providers were written, it sounds like some base/helper classes have been created to streamline the process of writing types, springifying them, etc.
Citations looks like an interesting tool. Dumping citations & references into Sakai seems like a reasonable use, piggybacking on resources might enable interesting capabilities like shared citation lists and others to be relatively simple. This feature screams for a JS book-marklet to “cite this” from your browser toolbar.
Talks about API changes for 2.5 – some thoughts about types of data to pass back, and the value of returning references vs. full-blown entities. How to set the types for say files uploaded via WebDAV — callback?