K2 for Sakai 3

As you may know, a few folks from the Sakai community, led by Ian Boston at Cambridge, are working on a new kernel that we believe will be the basis for Sakai 3.  It’s called “K2,” perhaps because it is relplacing K1 but also, perhaps, in reference to an impressive mountain.

Ian just added a nice entry to his blog. It explains some of the complexities of access control (AuthZ).  But even the non-techincal reader should take note of the last bit of the post. K2 is currently using Apache Sling as its basic infrastructure.  There are a lot of benefits to using existing open source software as the basis of K2 and I think Ian sums it up nicely:

… [with a small modification] its clear that with Dynamic Groups, the DefaultAccessManager in Jackrabbit 1.5 and the future Jackrabbit 2/JSR-283 will work for Sakai. The advantages of this are wide reaching since it means that much of the basic plubming code required for Sakai Kernel 2 is already present in Sling, leaving us, the future Sakai community to focus on teaching and research applications.

You can find out more about K2 here.