In this, my first post at Three Canoes, I wanted to make an observation from working as a consultant in the Sakai open source community during the last 7 months. I have had the opportunity to work with two universities and two vendors as a subcontractor.
One of the paradoxes of trying to eek out a living as one who supports open source software is that it is tempting to hold your cards close to your chest and suggest that any knowledge transfer must be paid for. It is tempting to repeat the same old trick over and over again. For example, I have a decent handle on how many of the Open Source Portfolio tools can be configured to support different portfolio scenarios. One of the trickiest bits to using the OSP tools involves iteratively writing the XSL file that gives the portfolio tool its marching orders on how to organize and display the student portfolio from a pile of assembled content.
When developing a stylesheet for a Sakai/OSP portfolio template, you ideally want your IDE to transform your passthrough XML with the same version of Xalan as Sakai. My version of OxygenXML is using Xalan 2.7, but Sakai is still stuck on Xalan 2.6. I've heard other template developers complain that their stylesheet works in OxygenXML, but fails in Sakai.