Does Sakai have the ability for plugins?

The company I currently work for builds enterprise software for educational facilities. I just finished a plugin for one of their products that integrates it into Moodle. This was simple and quick because all I had to do was create the source code and then bundle it up into a .zip.

Now they are coming to me wanting me to do the same thing for facilities using Sakai. I have realized that Sakai is basically compiled java running on a server.. yet am wondering if it has any plugin based or modification system I can utilize to integrate our product into it?

Also thanks in advance. :)

Solution

Sakai has 2 main methods for developing a new plugin (also sometimes called a tool).

LTI (1.0 and 2.0) - Sakai 10 supports the IMS LTI 1 and 2 specifications (it is the first LMS to have support for both). Older versions of Sakai (2.7 or newer) support LTI 1.0. This standard allows development of a tool which runs on it's own server but integrates with the learning system via a launching protocol.
Sakai tool webapp - Any Java webapp can be integrated into Sakai as a tool by adding a meta file (tool.xml), adding some parts to the web.xml, and optionally loading CSS/JS in the header and using Java APIs to access the Sakai kernel. More details about that are available in the Sakai wiki: https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/BOOT/Sakai+Programmer+Manual