Microsoft, Patnets and BlueJ (Java IDE)

Through Planet Eclipse I found a post detailing how Microsoft first stole and then patented an idea from a Educational Java IDE called BlueJ developed by Deakin University and the University of Kent. Although this may have been done unintentionally I hope this blows up into a bit of a PR disaster for them as their behavior in this matter doesn't seem very good.

ProxyUserDirectoryProvider

As part of the work I have been doing with Sakai and Bodington I needed to allow Sakai to access the user details that are stored in Bodington. The normal way to do this would be to write a UserDirectoryProvider (UDP) that sits in the components folder. The problem is that I didn't want to put the whole of Bodington into the components classloader and tomcat was going to load Bodington anyway as a webapp. The solution was to create a proxy that could be injected with the real Bodington UDP when Bodington started up. This needed to be an API that extended the standard UDP:

public interface ProxyUserDirectoryProvider extends UserDirectoryProvider {
UserDirectoryProvider getUdp();
void setUdp(UserDirectoryProvider udp);
}


This ProxyUserDirectoryProvider could then be requested from the component manager at Bodington startup and setUdp() called with the full implementation of the Bodington UDP. The proxy I created is currently sitting in https://svn.oucs.ox.ac.uk/projects/vle/sakai/user-proxy/trunk/.