This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
Portals and learning applications
E-literate has a worthwhile post on portals and learning applications. I left a comment that I will cross-post here.
In a portal like My Yahoo the portlet is not the application, it is a little feed that leads you into the application. Click a stock quote and you leave My Yahoo and got to Yahoo Finance. Yahoo Mail has a portlet but it's just a window that tells you how many unread message you have, if you want to send a message, you click a link in the portlet leave My Yahoo and move to Yahoo mail.
So wouldn't it make sense to develop applications so that they operate independently of the portal, but can send a small preview of their contents over to a portal? Sakai tries to be the portal, and assumes that EVERYTHING happens in that portal, you never leave.
This seems like a mistake, perhaps the best way to integrate UPortal is not to build into Sakai, but export views of Sakai to UPortal via JSR-168. Sakai doesn't need to be a consumer of JSR-168 (I believe that's the current plan) rather it can just export little windows into it's functionality to a larger university portal, that might also include portlets from the school teams, dining services, whatever. That way Sakai tools (quiz and gradebook, say) can share a class website together, and be happily talking to each other, while also each sending a preview to the school portal.