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Deploying, administering, and maintaining your portal

What kind of Java expertise would I need to have in order to successfully deploy and keep my campus instance of the portal running?

In general, over and above a working knowledge of and substantial experience with your chosen application server, you really have to understand the issues related to server-side application deployment and support in a modern, web-based environment. If you understand how to start, stop, and backup your your application server and a database server, and how to deploy a JSP 1.1/Servlet 2.2-based web application, then you know enough to administer a uPortal instance. Your application server vendor will be able to help you on this front with training and documentation if you don't.

What application server should I use for my campus uPortal instance?

uPortal will run in conjunction with any application server that complies with the Java Servlet 2.2 and Java Server Pages 1.1 specifications. There are members of JA-SIG currently operating uPortal instances with BEA's WebLogic, IBM's Websphere, and Caucho's Resin, among others. Please don't think that uPortal is somehow dependent upon Tomcat, the open-source JSP and servlet container from the Apache Jakarta project that ships with the existing "monterey" distribution and soon-to-be-released "plymouth" distribution. You can use any JSP 1.1/Servlet 2.2-compliant container or application server, and if you want commercial quality tech support, formal training or documentation, then a commercial application server is something to consider.

Does uPortal support single-sign in?

A qualified "Yes". The uPortal framework does provide an authentication system that explicitly supports the notion of single sign-on, but as of this writing there are few channels that ship with the framework which take advantage of it. Of course, any campus that wants to write their own channels that will use the uPortal single sign-on capabilities are certainly able to do so.

Does uPortal support LDAP authentication?

Yes. The problem, however, is that there are dozens of possible ways to do an LDAP authentication for uPortal and hence what is available now may not be useful for your campus. But there are a few Universities now who are using uPortal in conjunction with an LDAP server to authenticate users. There is a reference implementation available now for uPortal which handles authentication of users to the portal from information
stored in an LDAP server.

What doesn't uPortal use JAAS for authentication and/or authorization?

JAAS enables services to authenticate and enforce access controls upon users, but as currently specified by Sun, it makes many assumptions about how the services which use it will operate for effective use in a portal. JAAS allows authentication modules to be "plugged in" but doesn't allow services to modify the behavior of the system as a whole.

uPortal doesn't operate the way that JAAS assumes because a portal, any portal, must aggregate content and applications from disparate sources. uPortal must have an authentication mechanism that behaves differently than JAAS does because a portal must support single sign-on to applications which have their own, disparate authentication and/or authorization requirements.

The bottom line is that the uPortal developers think that authentication and authorization are currently too tightly coupled within JAAS, and would therefore delay the implementation of single sign-on in uPortal until Sun publishes a later revision of the JAAS specification which decouples them. Perhaps in the future JAAS could provide uPortal with security services, but in it's current state it does not have the flexibility nor the functionality to be incorporated well into uPortal.

How do I upgrade from one version of uPortal to another?

uPortal 2.1 comes with a database upgrade tool. See convert.xml which is an Ant build file that contains upgrade targets. Unfortunately, there is not yet a similar tool to help upgrade an existing uPortal installation to uPortal 2.2. The project desperately needs a volunteer to write such a tool. If you are interested, please email ~kweiner.

Developing your campus portal

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