If you want to import dotLRN as a url or rss channel, then I assume that it could be done quite quickly - at least I hope it could. That would be the way to develop a proof-of-concept. Of course neither a rss or url channel is that exciting, so I don't see that it would generate much interest - but I could be wrong.
For a real-tie in to uPortal, I think you need to use a servlet or applet base channel, and I think that is quite a bit more work - more work, better results. What I was trying to point out was that a servlet based channel which uses xml as a datasource could probably be implemented quite easily using existing soap services provided by axis. I mean if you go to the trouble to develop a servlet-based channel, then the additional step of tying in a web-services client to uPortal should be simple. The only additional work is creating a transport layer for axis that talks to aolserver. I've been looking at this part of the puzzle recently, since I've been interested in adding web-services for openacs. I think that it won't be too difficult to implement this, since axis was designed to be transport-agnostic. Currently, implementations of axis have implemented the transport layer using tcp, http, stmp, and they also have an example using files as a transport mechanism (the axis server watches for a particular file and uses it as a soap message input and responds with another file for the response).
