With the present state of Sakai, it seems to me that is all it would take to show that Sakai is very pre-beta with many critical LMS features missing or poorly implemented (the forums being the worst), while Moodle is a mature product, ready to go out of the box.
Agreed. I've been hanging out in the 'dev' course of SAKAI and the tool isn't there yet -- hell, it's barely out the gates. The 1.5 thing is clearly version number inflation (evil edit: to put it ahead of Moodle version numbering?). That in itself may be an indication of priorities, hopefully not.
I don't think there are any java/jsp sites the scale of yahoo?
There aren't, of course. All the big scalability game is using different LAMP variations: mod_perl, mod_python and mod_php on Apache. Databases see more variety, mostly mySQL or Postgres but also some really high-end stuff sometimes. This is the stuff that powers Yahoo, Google, Amazon, eBay... and Moodle.
As you rightly say, there's been enough time for all the tools to mature and show their abilities, Java included. And Java's scalability isn't there, and variations on the LAMP stack are what is being used industry-wide.
WRT the NZ cluster: it is hosting several campuses now, though none as large as the one for The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand. And it's working just fine on 4 finely-tuned servers. Last week I was running projections on a 10-fold usage, and the conclusion I arrived to was that we need larger hard drives, and perhaps an extra server assuming performance doesn't improve.
And I mention that because as traffic has increased, server load has decreased, month over month, because I keep finding things to tweak
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