Remove the RSS, OPML, and ATOM portals from Sakai 25 (SAK-50183)

[Charles Severance]

Hi all,

I have a side quest to clean up unused stuff but Sakai 25 code freeze.  The latest items are the RSS, OPML and ATOM portals.  These were added to Sakai back in a time where we thought there would be a semantic “web of data” (REST web services had not become popular yet).  Two of them have been broken for a long time.   And the third (RSS) seems unlikely to be useful.

https://sakaiproject.atlassian.net/browse/SAK-50183

https://github.com/sakaiproject/sakai/pull/12636

So I am going to remove them unless someone says they are using them.  Here is the JIRA with more prose.

Here are two links to see how well these work in master :)

https://trunk-maria.nightly.sakaiproject.org/portal/atom/

https://trunk-maria.nightly.sakaiproject.org/portal/opml/

If someone uses the RSS portal in the modern world - please let me know - it won’t take much convincing for me to leave it in. I just need to hear one user that is really using it.

The OPML and Atom portals are an easy decision IMHO.

Comments welcome.

/Chuck

[Charles Severance]

On Jun 7, 2024, at 5:06 PM, Leanne Poduska <leanne....@pepperdine.edu> wrote:

Good Afternoon,

Can you confirm which tools would be impacted by this? Podcast? News?

We currently have the Podcast tool in about 85 course sites (18 showing they are in use with data) and the News tool in 26 course sites. 

Thank you,

Leanne Poduska

Leanne,

TL;DR there will be no change at all to News or Podcast tools :)

Thanks for the question - these are the kinds of questions that I want to get and answers when we are deleting stuff.

The good news is that this change has no impact at all on the News or Podcasts tools - these tool *consume* incoming RSS feeds - what I deleted was the ability for Sakai to produce the list of sites at “/portal” as an outgoing feed.   For example, the dream was that ools ike Google Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader

would be able to let users subscribe to a list of sites in their Sakai and merge it with other RSSS feeds.   But it never worked well because login was required to get one’s personal sites, etc etc etc..   We never invested in sending things like notifications (again RSS is usually about non-login resources).

So the good news is that Podcast and News are unaffected :)

That said, a quick test of those tools and your use case on a nightly server should be quick and verify that nothing changed.

Thanks.

/Chuck