North-West University (South Africa) and Psybergate are engaged in an interesting project to develop "offline" capabilities for Sakai. Codenamed "Solo", the application will be contributed to the Sakai Community upon its release.
The idea behind Solo is to create a "disconnected" version of Sakai that would permit students to better control their internet usage in bandwidth-challenged environments like South Africa. NWU's initial thinking involves distributing a Solo client application and set of course materials to their students on a CD/DVD. The client would permit students to sync with their Sakai course sites when new or updated course materials become available. The offline client would include facades for synchronous tools such as chat that would warn the student that using such functionality would require (re)connecting to the internet. Provisioning content with updates could be handled by web services initiated at off-peak hours.
I suggested that NWU consider using Google Gears and the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). A Gears/GWT implementation is now underway. Phase I of the project involves syncing with CHS (resources), Announcements, Melete and Q&T (copy of tests only). Data syncing for this phase is unidirectional (from Sakai to Solo) and utilizes GWT's Remote Procedure Call (RPC) to access a Solo servlet and set of Sakai Solo services to perform sync operations.
My contribution to the Solo project has so far been a modest one. Besides setting up SVN, Jira/Confluence and Contrib accounts, securing signed contributor agreements and creating a Contrib project site and Jira and Confluence project spaces for the Solo team, I also had the pleasure of working directly alongside Psybergate's Louis Botha and Etienne Swanepoel during my recent visit to Cape Town. Louis, Etienne and I discussed general design issues and I provided a primer on Sakai API, service and tool development practices. I also helped Etienne set up his build environment, creating the base API, service and tool projects, adding the requisite pom.xml files and jar dependencies and ensuring that the tool and service "chassis", so to speak, could be built and deployed to Tomcat successfully.
Louis and Kobus Le Roux of NWU plan to demonstrate Solo and discuss its place in NWU's online learning strategy at the upcoming Sakai Paris conference.
Solo is housed in our contrib repo and can be checked out anonymously:
svn co https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/nwu/solo/trunk/