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uPortal community, I am pleased to announce the availability of the "general audience" release of uPortal 2.6.0. This release is available for immediate download from the uPortal website and is tagged in SVN. Since the second release candidate of uPortal 2.6.0, twenty-one issues have been addressed, including improvements to the performance of the exciting new AJAX preferences features, improvements to JSR-168 window state and JSP spec level support, and 18 other minor fixes. uPortal 2.6.0 includes many exciting improvements over prior uPortal releases, including a beautiful, div-centric out of the box theme, optional drag-and-drop preferences, a featureful and elegant DLM layout management scheme active by default, improved syndicated feed consumption, adoption of modern Java platform requirements, improved JSR-168 support, and numerous fixes and enhancements. I encourage you to try out uPortal 2.6, look to upgrade to it, and especially to articulate needs for and be involved in the further maintenance patches and evolutionary improvements that will allow uPortal 2.6 and future uPortal releases to even better meet your needs. Many people contributed code, testing, feedback, and issues leading up to the uPortal 2.6.0 release, including Faizan Ahmed, Nick Bolton, Susan Bramhall, Jen Bourey, Mark Boyd, Timothy Carroll, Vicky Crowley, Eric Dalquist, Don Fracapane, Andy Gherna, Glenda Gonzales, David Grimwood, Cris Holdorph, Brad Johnson, George Lindholm, Shawn Lonas, Elliot Metsger, Jason Shao, Chris Wagner, and Andrew Wills, to name a few. These people and others deserve credit for their parts in making uPortal possible. Andrew Petro |
High level discussion of uPortal 2.6.0
Enhancements in 2.6.0 not present in any 2.5.x release
- Drag and Drop user preferences available for default theme. Jennifer Bourey took point on making this happen and continues to merge in improvements derived from user experience testing.
- DLM (Distributed Layout Management, donated by SunGard Higher Education) as default layout management approach. Mark Boyd has been generous with his time and expertise in making this happen.
- A modern, Div-centric, CSS-using, beautiful default DLM-compatible structure transform / theme transform / skin derived from the highly successful MyRutgers uPortal project. Jason Shao was key to this effort.
- A new approach to RSS and other syndicated feed reading in the channel, CSyndFeedReader. This adds support for additional syndication formats (e.g., Atom) and adds potential for more robust error handling in the Java layer. Courtesy of Brad Johnson.
- A new JSP Channel Type has been contributed by SunGard. JSP channels are a lightweight alternative to full JSR-168 portlets and a highly successful channel development strategy employed in SunGard's Luminis uPortal-based product.
- Standardization on JDK 1.5 and support for JDK 1.6, moving uPortal to a more performant, more featureful development and runtime environment. Cris Holdorph took initiative in smoothing JDK 1.6 compatibility wrinkles.
- Refactoring core channels away from IMultithreaded* interfaces for better debugging and performance (Brad Johnson did the heavy lifting on this work)
- A new channel for easy publication of SQL queries as lightweight channels (CSqlQuery)
- Upgrade to Xalan 2.7.0 for improved performance and stability across uPortal
- System cache scope support for CGenericXslt, allowing shared caches for shared content across users where appropriate, e.g. for a common list of institutional links.
- Many fixes and performance enhancements, some of which derived from Unicon's Academus product and merged in by Unicon. Nick Bolton has done a lot of the work on this.
Enhancements in 2.6.0 introduced since 2.5.0 that may also appear in 2-5-patches
- Critical security vulnerability fix for CWebProxy and CGenericXslt channels.
- DLM threadsafety under high load
- uPortal ships with necessary CAS integration libraries and commented-out example CAS configuration
- DENY permissions now have the expected effect via the AnyUnblockedGrantPermissionPolicy. (Dan Ellentuck was key to validating this fix, and Brad Szabo fixed a serious bug in the initial implementation of this feature)
Reports from Jira, our issue tracker
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