Remove portal-chat, portal-video-chat, webrtc video from Sakai 25 - SAK-50207

[Charles Severance]

In my continuing story of pre-Sakai-25 cleanup of code that is obsolete, I present 

https://sakaiproject.atlassian.net/browse/SAK-50207

https://github.com/sakaiproject/sakai/pull/12648

This removes the portal chat features including the portal video chat using webrtc.  

TL;DR This was a really cool idea back when we thought Sakai was a social media platform but it has not been touched in nearly 10 years It has been commented out since 2022 because it never “made it’ to Trinity. If there is a school that is actively using it and wants it in 25 (it is not in 23) - they should be prepared to do a bit of work to bring it up to date technically, test it all, and then style it for Trinity.

Here is the text from the JIRA:

A long time ago, before the invention of Slack, Zoom, and Teams, Sakai had an idea that it would add a multi-user chat that would hover over your Sakai sites and let you talk to your Sakai connections in text.  Later some cool webrtc was added and with the right servers and configuration a simple Slack-like huddle could be created - all in Sakai.  My first record of it is 2011 (screen shot included) and if you look at the ‘git blame’ for portal-charon/charon/src/webapp/scripts/chat.js you will see activity from 2011-2015 with a lot of really cool folks making it better and better over time.

This was some *really great work* by some really smart developers around the world - but in the modern era, its time as an LMS feature has passed.  I shed a small tear when I seem how much talent and effort went into this - but ah well - time waits for no feature.

On a technical level, the last effort was 2015 and it has been commented out of the portal code since since 2022-10-27 because it was not “converted to trinity” and therefore not available at all in Sakai 23 and later.

It is my guess that this code is not running anywhere in production and thus can be deleted from Sakai 25.

If there are folks running this pre-trinity(23) and want it to run in trinity(23) - then a bunch of work needs to be done before Sakai 25.  I am guessing that a lot of it is just broken having not been tested for at least two years and likely more.

This does not affect the Chat tool (left nav placed in sites) at all.  That will continue to work unchanged.

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As always, I am announcing this to make sure anyone and everyone has a chance to comment code removal.   Questions and comments welcome.

/Chuck

[Adam Marshall]

It’s a great idea to remove code like this. Hats off to you Chuck.

 

adam

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