uMobile Roadmap

uMobile Phase 1

uMobile phase 1 development concentrated on developing a stable, high-quality platform for delivering mobile content. This phase included developing an initial mobile app with native integration, developing a jQuery Mobile-based server skin, and developing jQuery Mobile interfaces for existing portlets. This phase has been declared complete as of the uMobile 1.0 RC1 release.

uMobile Phase 2

Architecture Updates

Performance Improvements

Some portlets (particularly the calendar) need performance improvements. We could attempt to improve performance either by maintaining the current WebView-based approach and improving caching, or by transitioning this module to be a native module. In order to decide on an approach, we should first profile the loading behavior to determine whether the delay is due to network I/O or JavaScript parsing. If network I/O seems to be a bottleneck, we should determine how much improvement can be gained from setting ETags and cache headers.

If acceptable performance can be achieved through ETags and cache headers, uMobile could contribute to completing full JSR-286 cache support in the uPortal platform. If not, select modules like the calendar should be implemented as native modules that consume REST feeds from the portlet.

Link from Web-based to Native Modules

Android Button Integration

Module Updates

Map

• Categories and browsing
• Multi-campus support
• Allow user to center map to geolocation
• Tablet-specific UI

Courses

Alternate merged announcement view

Discussion at the Sakai conference indicated that some institutions would prefer a merged view of synoptic information for announcements, etc. While the current by-course view is valuable, we might add an alternate view that merges information from multiple courses.

LMS integration implementations

To make uMobile easily adoptable, the uMobile community should develop working implementations of the generic LMS connector for popular LMS systems suich as Sakai, Moodle, and Blackboard.

It would also be beneficial to implement the new uMobile search API in the courses portlet, allowing the portlet to report search results from implemented LMSs.

Directory

Contact download

Tablet-specific UI

Announcements/Notifications

uMobile is in need of a high-quality announcements and/or notifications portlet. Jasig does not currently offer such a portlet with a jQuery Mobile-based interface, though the Announcements Portlet might be a good starting point, as it already has a custom mobile interface. Alternatively, one of the in-development notifications portlets from a uPortal institution might be a good fit.

Additional Portlets

uMobile would benefit from the development of additional custom portlets. Such portlets might include:

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