Where Sakai is heading

Chuck Severance delivered a very inspiring talk yesterday which had the rather dull title "Sakai Technical Overview". But most people at the conference already now that Chuck will always entertain you with something new or something crazy, so that will you have a great time listening. So, the room was fully packed when Chuck started.
Chuck started indeed with a technical overview of Sakai and once again stressed that Sakai is a enterprise level application and should be viewed, used and deployed that way. He showed the impressive figures of the myUnisa installation (more than 17000 unique visits within 2 weeks), of which you might have read elsewhere on this blog.
And then Chuck talked about the upcoming release of Sakai (2.2). But he also looked a little bit further ahead. And I found that most interesting. You can read all the stuff at Chuck's own website (and look for the items dated June 1). I will not repeat all of his views and remarks here, but some ideas that I picked up will follow:

• There will be a time that Sakai can talk "PHP"
• He sees Sakai becoming the Swiss army knife that does it all. And by all, we do not mean that Sakai will become a monolithic system that we all have become to hate more or less. No, actually Sakai will talk all sorts of 'languages' and standards in the near future (2-3 years from now). So think RSS, webservices, REST, SOAP, CalDav, WebDav and iCal!
• Internationalization (I18N) will become an important criterium, amongst others (like Oracle db support and proper Help files), for a tool to move from a provisional tool to become part of the official release.

All in all this was really a great presentation (or should I say performance?) on the future of Sakai. I really like this vision especially with regard of Sakai to be seen as a Swiss army knife. This is where also Service-Oriented Architecture comes is on one hand (remember: Sakai is an enterprise system!). But on the other hand Sakai will embrace and make good use of the quite 'simple' standards that are emerging within what is called Web 2.0 (can I still use this wording?). Which is great!
And now I am going to take a walk (it is 5.50 AM over here in Vancouver).