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The complete minutes from the Spring 2005 developers meeting are currently being reviewed. They will be posted as soon as they are readyRevision of April 24, 2005, 23:45 EDT

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Slides

uPortal Developers' meeting

March 21-22, 2005 Monday and Tuesday
at the offices of Unicon, Inc., El Segundo, CA.

revision of April 24, 2005, 23:45 EDT

The static version of the minutes are based on notes taken live by Michael Oltz, and reviewed by presenters and other attendees. The subsequent dynamic version is broadly editable,and likely to reflect ongoing development and debate over the issues as originally raised.

Attendees

Duffy Gillman – University ofArizona
Dan Ellentuck – Columbia University
John Fereira – Cornell University

Michael Oltz – Cornell University
Sriman Ravi – University of Georgia
Jim Farmer – instructional media + magic, inc.
Patty Gertz* – Princeton
Paul Lynn* – Princeton
William G. Thompson, Jr.* – Rutgers University
Scott Battaglia – Rutgers University

Chuck Severance – Sakai - University of Michigan
Ann Badertscher – Sigma Systems, Inc.
Mark R. Boyd – SunGard SCT
Vishal Goenka – SunGard SCT
Keith Stacks – SunGard SCT
Mike Zackrison – SunGard SCT

Eric Dalquist – Unicon, Inc.
Michael Ivanov – Unicon, Inc.
Freddy Lopez – Unicon, Inc.
Cris J. Holdorph – Unicon, Inc.
Peter Kharchenko – Unicon, Inc.
Adam Rybicki – Unicon, Inc.
Doug Gouldin – Unicon, Inc.
Nicholas Blair – University of Wisconsin - Madison

Curt Ellmann – University of Wisconsin - Madison
Andrew Petro – Yale University

• Patty Gertz and Paul Lynn 'attended' by speakerphone for a session about the JA-SIG Clearinghouse server machine. Bill Thompson 'attended' by speakerphone for part of Tuesday afternoon.

Useful links of concepts often referred to.

uPortal homepage
uPortal Confluence
uPortal CVS archive

uPortal Jira
JA-SIG Clearinghouse

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MONDAY March 21

uPortal 2.4 performance and memory

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24PerfMem 24PerfMem

by Scott Battaglia, Rutgers on behalf of Bill Thompson

[These notes are based in part on the Powerpoint presentation Slides, which has more details.]

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Nick gave a few recommendations

uPortal 2.4.x, Future Release, Branch maintenance

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24future 24future

by Andrew Petro, Yale

[This session regards how the uPortal project uses its CVS archive]

[The notes are taken in part from the Powerpoint presentation Slides.]

This will cover
– what we currently do
– our deployer community
– what we could do

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Andrew: The most appropriate way to track patches against older releases is to put it in CVS.

Spring and uPortal 2.x

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2xSpring 2xSpring

by Andrew Petro, Yale

[These notes are based in part on the Powerpoint presentation Slides which has more details]

The problem that the Spring framework effort addresses is dependencies.

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Peter K recommended that this could be spun out as a micro-project producing a jar
This might ease maintenance:
– multiple codebases can use this code.
Dan E: Good idea. For example, that would make migration of PAGS into 3.0 easier.

Distributed Layout Manager integration with base code

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DLMIntegration DLMIntegration

by Mark Boyd of SunGard SCT

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2.5 will be out in two or three weeks
2.6 will be out about 6 months later.

uPortal 2.5 release issues

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25Release 25Release

facilitated by Adam Rybicki
release schedule or release content

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Cris H (Unicon): From our point of view, it's best to have uPortal work well on Java 1.5, because what if the memory leak problem has been fixed in 1.5? So, I recommend we go forward.

LUNCH BREAK

uPortal Clearinghouse

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Clearinghouse Clearinghouse

with Patty Gertz and Paul Lynn from Princeton [via
speakerphone]

Clearinghouse has two meanings:

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"JA-SIG, Inc." is the official name.

uPortal Documentation

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Documentation Documentation

facilitated by John Fereira

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John: has a module in CVS called uportal_documentation that contains a snapshot of all the documentation in xml format. The Anakia ant task transforms the xml documentation into html pages, creating "web" and "print" versions.

uPortal-Sakai integration

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SakaiIntegration SakaiIntegration

Andrew Petro did most of this presentation, with Charles Severance present he arrived during lunchtime

[This presentation is in part from the Powerpoint presentation Slides which has much more detail.]

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Charles: I have a 20-slide presentation that I will send around instead of presenting here. We have figured out a way to write Sakai services in a flexible, Spring-like way. the way we do this may be helpful to the uPortal 3.0 effort.

uPortal 2.6:

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uPortal26 uPortal26

by Andrew Petro

[These notes are taken in part from the Powerpoint presentation Slides which has more detail.]

We usually put out dot releases every six months or so.

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discover uP 2.6 goals via list discussion, and in our Confluence Wiki, then make these into a roadmap of scheduled issues in Jira.

Permissions Framework

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Permissions Permissions

– Keith Stacks

SunGard SCT refers to the principal associated with a channel as the "audience" (who can get
at that channel). Their permissions model has a much more flexible way of granting permissions, using complex boolean logic expressions.
SunGard SCT is contributing this model to the JA-SIG code base.

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Eric Dalquist
– we want to put the presentations online

uPortal 3

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up3Intro up3Intro

facilitated by Peter Kharchenko

[These notes are taken in part from the Powerpoint presentation Slides, which has more detail.]

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Testing
identify resources/institutions
QA and Performance Test

Quality Assurance and Testing

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ReleaseQA ReleaseQA

facilitated by Eric Dalquist

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Another issue discussed was, can we identify more people's time to apply to do additional pre-release testing? Charles Severance said regarding that: Sakai has a volunteer QA effort. The people who are responsible for making Sakai work at various sites, some are willing to try out the new code to see if it is good. We have gotten volunteer QA to work. We tell them to use Jira to report problems, then the developers monitor that. There needs to be leadership for QA, but it probably should not be a developer.

Rendering Contexts and components for uportal 3

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up3Contexts up3Contexts

by Peter Kharchenko

[These notes are taken in part from the Powerpoint presentation Slides which has more detail.]

The concept is, that the entire way that uPortal determines a user's layout, prepares it for display, and responds to inputs, can be different for different users in the same instance of uPortal. Actually, a user might even switch between contexts within the scope of the same session.

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PortletURL delivered to the portlets
implements IPortletURL
adds ability to obtain uPortal-specific URL constructors
getUrlConstructor (name)
IPortletUrlConstructor
implements portlet URL syntax
also configurable

Pluto integration, WSRP producer and consumer

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Pluto Pluto

by Michael Ivanov

JSR-168 Pluto container portlet rendering engine implements JSR-168 provides a runtime environment for portlets and calls Portlet invoker to execute them contains interfaces that ...

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Is it possible for WSRP Producer to share one Pluto container's instance with uPortal 3 by changing dynamic providers on-the-fly? i.e. if regular portal requests and WSRP requests come into the same instance of the portal servlet can we handle both of them? There was some discussion of this suggesting how to do it.

LUNCH BREAK

uPortal 3 – Portlet Development

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PortletDev PortletDev

Eric Dalquist

One problem is, providing access to portal services from a portlet
[portlets have their own class loader so you can't
get at uPortal classes in the normal way]
Special access-layer classes shared library location in the servlet container
if the portal API changes, then the interfaces in this layer have to change as well as their implementations.
this increases maintenance overhead and debugging effort.
Moving services to shared location

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Sakai makes heavy use of JSF. JSF kind of takes development back from web applications to more the way stand alone apps were written. With for example, events and listeners. Supposedly there exists shim code to make this work within a portlet.

uPortal Leadership

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uPLeadership uPLeadership

discussion facilitated by Eric Dalquist

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Bill T: Regarding the memory leak issues you discussed. Our intent with Scott was to share what our struggles have been so we can head off things before they bite us in production. We released with expectations of quality that were not met. I think we need to adopt the concept of quality and have a QA process. So that people will know what to expect.

BREAK

Miscellaneous uPortal 3 Questions

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uP3Misc uP3Misc

by Peter Kharchenko
he just brought up these things that need to be decided eventually; there was no attempt to discuss them at length or make decisions

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Andrew: Also, bookmarkable links would be great. (going directly to a specific tab or focused portlet).

service integration

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up3up2ServiceIntegration up3up2ServiceIntegration

Slides
Main services from uPortal2
directory
groups
permissions

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