uPortal Developers' Meeting
Johns Hopkins University
April 23-27, 2007
[in process of editing on Tuesday May 29 and Wednesday May 30 after which will be opened up to attendees for corrections]
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Attendees
- In Person
- Michael Oltz -
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- Cornell
- Jonathan Markow -
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- JA-SIG
- Chris Doyle
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- - Johns Hopkins
- Theron Feist
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- - Johns Hopkins (Tuesday only)
- Phil
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- Gianuzzi -
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- Johns Hopkins
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- Elliot Metsger -
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- Johns Hopkins
- Dwight Raum -
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- Johns Hopkins
- Jason Shao
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- - Rutgers
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- (Tuesday only)
- Colin Clark -
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- University of Toronto, FLUID Project
- Michelle D'Souza -
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- University of Toronto, FLUID Project
- Peter Kharchenko -
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- - Unicon, Inc.
- Eric Dalquist
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- - University of Wisconsin - Madison
- Jen Bourey
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- - Yale
- Susan Bramhall -
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- Yale
- by video at Boston University
- Kim Soo Il -
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- Boston University (Sakai)
- Amir Rashid
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- - Boston University
- Peggy Wang
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- - Boston University
- by video at Rutgers
- Faizan Ahmed
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- - Rutgers
- Dan Ellentuck
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- - Columbia
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NOTE: When it says a session is "by" someone it does not necessarily mean they have been responsible for the work or action item in question. It means only that they presented, discussed, or facilitated that session.
A few terms used elsewhere without explanation
CAS - - Centralized Central Authentication Service, a single sign-on system originally developed at Yale University, but has been since contributed to become a JA-SIG project.
Layout manager - - that part of the uPortal infrastructure that assembles a user's layout for display, and allows them to change it.
SLM - - Simple Layout Manager, the earliest model still in use. The user sees a default layout until they make even one tiny change. At that point, a custom copy of the entire layout is made for that user, and the user will see no further changes the site staff make to the default layout.
ALM - - Aggregated Layout Manager, introduced the concept of "fragments", tabs which are maintained by site staff and which are kept up to date in the view of each user.
DLM - - Distributed Layout Manager, has capabilities parallel to ALM but considered an improvement. Contributed by SunGard SCT to the uPortal code base.
MONDAY APRIL 23
Future options for conferences and meetings
by Jonathan Markow
presently 2 conferences GAP - Groups and Permissions, which implements user authorization in a hierarchical manner. Written at Columbia U and contributed to JA-SIG.
MONDAY APRIL 23
Future options for conferences and meetings
by Jonathan Markow
presently 2 conferences a year
June conference is uPortal - - has become more inclusive
December - - broader scope, tools, middleware, technology in general. not as well attended, although the people who attend get a lot out of it.
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Board suggests for December, a different format to lower the conference management costs. What do the people here think:
June - - "JA-SIG One" - - Projects all over the spectrum, including uPortal, fully fledged - - has an extra day now.
December - - "JA-SIG face to face" or "JA-SIG working sessions" - - focus on working out issues on specific projects, etc.
- hosted at an institution rather than a hotel
- less need to manage proposals and registration
- minimal "track leads"
- have activities organized across: e.g. uPortal developers; coding sessions; bar camps; bug fixing marathons; documentation marathons
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- (Jonathan Markow joked "they would need extra beer"
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- ); HyperContent; sakai/uportal collaboration; put together grant proposals; board could get together; training; i.e. various self-organizing groups
This would be less costly, would need an overall organizer/program chair; and leads by kind of activity.
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Jonathan: Invite non-JA-SIGgers to come together and work on projects at the same time. e.g. Moodle.
Andrew: Would Concentra not be involved at all? Concentra is adding a lot of value in making the conference happen. I'm concerned about the ability of volunteers to execute on the logistics sufficiently to make a December conference happen without Concentra.
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[Rutgers video was not going when we began; they have now arrived and introduced themselves]
uPortal 3 Status Update
by Eric Dalquist
ElliottElliot, David DeWolfe, Eric, and Peter met and changed uPortal 3 over to Pluto 1.1 (a significant change). Got about 25,000 lines smaller because 1.1 has those things built in.
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[keep in your mind: Things that uPortal depends on should switch over to using Maven, e.g. GAP.]
Using Maven (2) for uPortal 3
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- standard structure for the folders
- don't have to write code as to how to compile, or package
- Maven does auto dependency calculation
- Have to check out less stuff from subversion (fewer jars in there)
ElliottElliot: Getting to understand the terminology is one of the barriers.
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There are several ant utilities that help with this building process, they are listed at the bottom of that page.
Susan: There are aspects of configuring uPortal that you have to run uPortal in order to change it.
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Eric/Andrew: Upgrading from uportal 2 to 3 is going to be inherently hard.
Andrew: One of our developers (Drew Wills Andrew Wills (Deactivated) at Unicon) is addressing migration from one version of uPortal to another. Currently this has been between uPortal 2.x versions, but it lays a groundwork for exporting data from a 2.x instance for import into a 3.x instance.
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The first two Eric feels have to be done, the rest he would like to be done before the conference. -- he wants to cut the release about a week before.
uPortal 3 XML data formats for Import and Export
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Eric: Export/import isn't so much "actions" (move channel from group a to group b) but more a different representation of the data. Sort of object serialization.
ElliottElliot: It's exactly object serialization.
Andrew: There's that field in the persondirs table that's misspelled.Susan[Related anecdote about a database column with a misspelled name that, once established with this broken name, is left that way because it's too hard to track down references needing to change it. It's not clear from these minutes how this was at all relevant, but Andrew remembers it as being more relevant than it now seems].
Susan: What is this export/import for?
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Eric: How do we deal with referencing objects? We now have a whole domain object hierarchy instead of a simple "channel" thing. Harder to reference into those.
ElliottElliot: If we want to be able to hand-edit the XML files, this is a problem. For exmaple Confluence and Jira tell you never to hand-edit.
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Susan: Perhaps we should discourage hand-editing.
ElliottElliot: Yes, there should be tools instead.
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Peter: issues: a) serialization of beans to XML b) coordination -- all the various pieces working together.
ElliottElliot: The things that do the serialization and the things that do the coordination will be different things.
Peter: We could put together two different projects to do that.
What about "Xstream"?
ElliottElliot: I've used that and it's really nice -- it is a low level thing and can use just about any parser you want. The programmer has detailed control over how the process goes. You can provide a "converter object" to handle things that are not built in to XML.
Peter: Does it handle collections OK?
ElliottElliot: Yes.
[how does it handle relationships?]
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uPortal 2 XML import and export
by Andrew Petro (Andrew) and Andrew Wills (Deactivated) ("Drew") Wills also , both of Unicon Inc.
Powerpoint and code sample available as attachments to the wiki page for this meeting session
The session for tomorrow on XML import/export for uportal 2 using Cernunnos, was moved from Tuesday to Monday, as it is closely related to what we were discussing before lunch.
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Andrew: There is the mechanics of of (importing and exporting data) where where the readability is not so important, and there are the administrative tasks which humans have to be able to do.
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Eric: Why don't you, Drew, send out an initial note on uportal-dev list telling what you have and see what happens. I can put you in touch with someone at U Wisc.
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Faizan: If you want to use it to convert from SLM to DLM, we could try that here at Rutgers.
[Andrew is on the projector, so Eric asked him to just continue with a later session]
Recent Unicon OpenSource Activity relative to uPortal
by Andrew Petro
Powerpoint and info in wiki page representing this session in Confluence.
San Joaquin Delta College
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- Columbia Announcements further customizations to
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- better meet alerts use cases, along the lines of what the Rutgers Alerts system accomplishes. [i.e. add notifications to it]
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- Email preview portlet.
work on 2.6
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- release engineering activities
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- fixes and enhancements from Academus merged into uPortal.
"OpenToro"
Academus 2.1 was codenamed "Toro"
The functionality that is in 2.1 is being opensourced open sourced [little details that are not]
They are not opensourcing open sourcing the brand name.
toro-channels
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- IChannels and frameworky stuff
toro-portlets
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- portlets
toro-sdk and toro-resource-pool (predated common-dbcp)
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- utilities
http://code.google.com/p/toro-channels/ [et cetera]
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"CSCR" client-side channel rendering technology -- asynchronous channel rendering using frames. not the most modern take on what that would look like.
- gateway Single Sign-on
- briefcase
- messaging/notifications
- permissions management
toro-resource-pool--
- predates Commons
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- DBCP
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- nice debugging/logging facilities
Why open source?
Easier to deliver on support and services on a platform everyone can use "eyes wide open"
Going out under GPL
What is Unicon's angles angle?
Healthier JA-SIG projects lead to more adoption which leads to wider customer base
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Announcements -- further enhancement of the USC enhancements to Columbia
Email preview channel portlet -- currently replays the password, will CASify this. Peter has got involved a bit. -- Andreas Christoforides, and Mark McClellan.
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Gateway Single Sign-On --
[Eric at U Wisc has a beatiful beautiful Bookmarks Portlet]
We don't want competing bookmarks project.
This is under GPL "with FLOSS exception" -- and so uPortal can bundle it, use it anyway.. It would remain under the GPL license. uPortal cannot ship modified versions of it that are not also under the GPL license with FLOSS exception - the way to do that would be to make the mods in the existing Google Code projects or, less desirable but perfectly legal, in forks of those projects, and then ship the binary output of those projects.
The Gateway SSO is store-and-forewardforward; it 's only for people who are not using existing SSO solutionis most attractive people who are not using existing SSO solution or whose existing SSO solution isn't applicable to a specific problem.
Gateway SSO can be used for things other than SSO. It's a generic smart-Iframe-engine. You could use it to navigate the user to an interesting spot in an external website. With CAS or another SSO, authentication might even be transparent.
Calendar channel: Bedework, Zimbra, Chandler, why this one? You're welcome to it, here it is, but the ongoing recommended uPortal integration solution will almost certainly be something else, a larger project built entirely around this problem.
Faizan: the iCal rendering channel, Jason was originally going to be releasing that. But Faizan saw that there are some error handling problems, so he pulled it back from the release. (Jason is going over to Sakai team at Rutgers, from the portal team)
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This is now in progress. We will have 'uportal-dev' and 'uportal-usersuser' and it will be easier to have specific mailing lists. It's off "uportal.org".
Hypercontent access to the uPortal Developers' site
by Eric Dalquist Should Dalquist
It is suggested that we let people other than John Fereira update the site?.
[developer.ja-sig.org] Presently you write email to webmaster@ja-sig.org.
Jonathan: I think we should have a couple more people doing this, but not a lot of people.
GAP, Maven, and Hibernate
by Eric Dalquist Dalquist
Dan: [some questions related to GAP]
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Eric: Spring is actually a facade. Can plug in EHCache or JCache or OSCache etc. Uportal 3 has completely gone away from the idea of user-specific caching. For example, there is a portlet window cache. Maintaining a _separate_ cache per user is too much overhead. Instead there is one cache per object type [which is indexed per user when appropriate].
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Andrew: The Academus product documentation is not yet available with the toro stuff. We're going to have to 'airbrush out' the trademark or something. Until then you're on the bleeding edge.edge. (Since this developer meeting, Unicon has made Academus product documentation available free of charge on its website. This is not documentation of the open source toro projects as such, but it is loosely applicable as it is the documentation of the product from which these open source projects derive.)
Faizan: asked about the Email Preview channel portlet [apparently he was out of the other room when this was discussed]
Andrew: briefly covered it again. It reasonably handles errors. It will handle only one account, that of the person logged into the portal; it can't switch among multiple email accouts accounts used by that one user. But it's pretty pluggable and modularly designed - it's pretty clear how you would extend it to do all these sorts of things.
Jonathan: ECL and Apache have slightly different licenses, and JA-SIG wants to change toward an Apache 2.0 or 2.1 style license. We want to be on an OSI-approved license.
There was some discussion re licensing. For example, we are not eligible for Google Summer of Code funding. (Subsequent to the meeting it was determined that JA-SIG projects are in fact eligible, being under an acceptable New BSD license).
Andrew: Where did we get our license [the one used on uPortal]?
Jonathan: Wasn't that the MIT license?
Andrew: It looks something like that, but it looks more like the Apache 1.1 license.
(Since the developer meeting, John Lewis re-discovered that JA-SIG is actually using the New BSD License, which is already an OSI-certified "open" and FSF-recognized "free" license.)
Tuesday, April
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uPortal 2.6 Status Update
by Andrew Petro
Drag and Drop user preferences
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- Layout restrictions
- Alerts-like functionality
- Just-in-time insertion of "stuff" into the layout
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- Security advisory around RSS reader instances?
On Platform Maturity:
uP2 has warts, but also has "platform maturity"
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back to Andrew: Jason has been working on documentation. It's on the wiki. Not quite ready for release. [Since the meeting this has been opened up for public comment and participation as the "uPortal Manual" wiki space, but not yet pushed hard out to the world because it still has large gaps.]
On release availability:
- There is a 2.6.0 wiki page.
- You can download M1 (since the meeting, an RC1 has been added)
- Vincent Mathieu made a quickstart of the M1 [has been posted since the meeting]
There is a CSqlQuery channel. Could it be subject to SQL injection attacks?
What about JChart?
Skinning 2.6:
Customizing the XSLT is optional
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Backward compatible with CGenericXSLT
Based Built on Rome library
XSLT -> Java processing (more robust)
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-- Jen added runtime end-user config
Fixes from the 2.5.x. series should series should also all be in 2.6.0 M1
Requires JDK 1.5 or 1.6
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- Reduced lock thrash
- Simpler
- Easier to debug/log
uPortal CAS integration convergence
by Andrew Petro
The CAS support available to work with uPortal has been evolving.
Added the CAS support into uPortal codebase code base as of 2.5.x (.2?)
There eventually There eventually resulted two competing attempts to define shared CAS integration APIs
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Jason: Let's produce a distribution with uPortal and CAS, and a config that lets our existing authentications talk through CAS.
[pop the stack back to talking about uPortal 2.6]
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Let's try to put the document caching on 2.7.
[morning break]
uPortal 2.7
by Andrew Petro
Jan Nielsen's (from SunGard SCT) vision for platform maturity
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Mark Boyd and DLM evolution--
- he put some enhancements in
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- trunk
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- There are more features available in the Sandbox
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- Let's merge these into the core, QA, and release uPortal 2.7 with better DLM
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- (more on this in a later meeting slot)
CAS server integration--
- Proxy CAS for the masses
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- Easier -> better documentation
Rutgers remote document caching--
- Can this make 2.6?
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- Or does it need to go into a 2.7?
Portlet support--
- Move to Pluto 1.1 (uP3 went to this)
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- JSR-286? The revised, not yet final, portlet specification [not included in Pluto 1.1 but doing the Pluto thing positions us for 286]
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- Fix for the dreaded UP-1040 bug [a multiply-published portlet can get preference settings confused between instances]
Jonathan: Chuck Severance suggested that David DeWolf should put WSRP support into Pluto 1.2.Andrew: WSRP is nice to have and allows you integration with various things, but we have other things that are more importantDavid DeWolf should put WSRP support into Pluto 1.2.
Andrew: WSRP is nice to have and allows you integration with various things, but we have other things that are more important. An ongoing problem with WSRP support in uPortal is that the institutions contributing developer and release engineer resources don't get much value from it, so it's a losing proposition investing calories in maintaining this thing from which the maintainers derive no value. If WSRP is to succeed in uPortal, someone who derives value from it needs to step up to the place and contribute resources of one form or another.
Jonathan: There are a subset of large institutions who see a value in WSRP support in the portal. They are not here today. We should have at least WSRP consumer.
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uPortal gets dinged in side-by-side comparisons with other portals on less out of the box functionality (portlets, channels)
Energy is lost to lost to "friction"--
- There are a lot of neat
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- open source plugins for uportal
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- It requires lots of calories to figure out how to get them all working in your portal
code versioning friction--
- for example, what versions of the announcements channel will work in what versions of uPortal with what modifications?
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- merging source into uPortal source tree allows each uPortal release to be developed and maintained as a cohesive whole.
The uPortal channels CVS (now, SVN) is not used as a working collaboration repository but as a stick-it-in-there repository.
Energy is lost to installation friction--
- Even when the code will work perfectly (no version mismatch) it's still problematic
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- find it, install it, maybe provision a db, configure/publish the channel, all just to try it out.
We could put the channel source into the main tree, and have them built at the same time, or have separate build scripts for each channel. In either case we will be better able to see what compilation problems there are.
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Jonathan: If we integrate these channels, would that make the expectation that the same things will be available in uP3 as portlets? [This would reduce interest in uP3 if they are not included]uP3 if they are not included]
Eric: (Something to the effect of, that's not a reason not to get the most value out of uP2 we can.)
Jason: Who owns this vision and who will drive this forward? What portions of this idea are discouraging to viability of 2.6?
DLM XHTML/CSS skins for 2.6
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2.6 includes a somewhat genericized version of the Rutgers theme, which uses XHTML and CSS.
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Drag and Drop for uPortal 2.6
by Jen by Jen Bourey
Most features copied from the preferences channel
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Javascript Resources
Uses the Dojo ! AJAX library
Portal dojo classes
Implemented in ajax-preferences.js
Servlets--
- Channel registry
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- Ajax callback targets
Theme param injector (turns the functionality on)
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Susan: The "use without adding" makes the concept of a layout less important to me. It's more, "find something to use and use it".
Andrew: The idea of a dashboard ("tell me what's going on at the moment") means that a layout is still usefulThe idea of a dashboard ("tell me what's going on at the moment") means that a layout is still useful. Search followed by "use without adding" is a compelling way to get at services when I already know what I'm looking for. Iteratively searching for every information-providing-widget and seeing if it has anything to say defeats the value of a portal as a digital dashboard, an information and indicator aggregation engine.
UI Testing results
- Confusing terminology
- Channel adding should be more obvious
- Drag and drop tabs?
- Simplicity
- Users want less tabs
- Possibly too many features
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Jason: Should we distinguish to our users in terminology between stuff provided by the site staff, and things the users put in themselves (RSS, photo pages, etc.).
Colin: FLUID could put some time into working on the terminology.
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Jonathan: Can users move channels between tabs?
Jen: Not yet. Not for 2.6.
We won't have the concept of setting the active tab to any other than the first one. Just move it to be the first one.
Jason: Does Yale have DLM-locked content?
Susan: I think we'll have to lock the tabs, because we would have no way to push new content.
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Such as, integration with Google Appliance.
A short discussion about issues using Ajaxy Javascript, e.g. preventing namespace collisions, some scripts aren't designed to be included more than once in a page, using embedded IFrames.
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Unicon has done some stuff with frames. Shawn Lonas (shawn@unicon.netDeactivated) and Gary Thompson (gary@unicon.netDeactivated). Academus: there is a "download worker" a channel can give you a link to download something produced by the portal. So they put in a callback and the target of the callback is the content of the channel.
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Jason: So is the next step to make a working group and set up a conference call or something? (Spawned Jira issue to track task of forming working group.)
Colin: Melissa and I would be interested in being involved in that discussion.
Followup on DLM Status
by Andrew Petro
Mark Boyd Mark Boyd was at SunGard SCT (SunGard HE), where he contributed much work to the Distributed Layout Manager and moving it into the uPortal code uPortal code base, but now he now ;he has moved on to other things.
DLM: he has some material contributed to 2.6.
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Andrew: Apparently the decision is, we coast for several months and see what happens, and do not as yet try to do anything about the Sandbox.
JSR-168 support in uPortal2; status and prognosis
by Andrew by Andrew Petro
There are a few sites present running portlets, and some who want to.
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[Andrew and Susan are going to be representing channels at the "Channels vs. Portlets SmackdownPortlets Smackdown" at the summer conference. They expect it won't be much of a fight.]
a) UP-1040 - - a Jira issue about mapping channel parameters into portlets. Should be able to multiply publish a single portlet. There is a big bug where if you do that they randomly see each other's parameters, etc. Eric says this has something to do with Pluto 1.0, Pluto 1.1 addresses it. Right now UWisc, for example, uses many duplicate portlets with different names-actually the same portlet-so they don't get their parms confused. There is now a patch that Tim Carroll wrote that may fix it.that may fix it. (Subsequent to developer meeting, this fix was integrated into the source code for inclusion in uPortal 2.6.0 RC1
b) Pluto 1.1. JSR-168 support in uP2 consists mostly of CPortletAdapter and Pluto. So what we need to do is drop in the 1.1 jar and rewrite the CPortletAdapter. How much work is it?
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Jonathan: Can we broaden where we look for help to do this? Posting to the mailing list seems to have worked before. Is there more than one bullet point for which we could ask for help? Who should get these bullet points lined up and then post a request on the mailing list?
Andrew: There is a 'bite-sized issue' list on the wiki but it has not attracted attention. This sounds like the kind of thing the uPortal steering committee would handle. Is it time yet?
Jonathan: The steering committee is further in the future.
ElliottElliot: Make the ROI clear for each feature.
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Susan: That would be the steering committee.
Andrew: I don't think we can waitwe can wait. What if we immediately draft a steering committee consisting of the project managers at some of the most involved players: Charise Arrowood for Unicon, Bill Thompson or a delegate for Rutgers, Jim Helwig for Wisconsin, Roger Despres for Yale. People who both command resources and who have a stake in the quality and viability of the project. And when JA-SIG is ready to elect people to these positions rather than draft them out of thin air, great, do that, but in the meantime we'd have some steering.
Jason: Right now we're getting lots of requests for statistics, more than development.
ElliottElliot: A couple approaches: (a) See if Tim's patch re UP-1040 will work. (b) delete the Pluto 1.0.1 jar and find the red wavy lines in Eclipse
Mavenizing uPortal-related projects
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Jason: Do we have an example portlet or channel that is built on Maven? This would make adoption easier.
ElliottElliot: We have five portlets that use Maven.
[ afternoon break ]
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uPortal and the FLUID Project
by Colin Clark
Wiki page for this presentation
Powerpoint slides for this presentation
[During this session I typed in a lot more things from the slides than I had for other sessions. Because the FLUID Project is new to uPortal I decided to leave in a lot of that. But you can refer to the slides as well. There is some discussion here also, especially toward the end. -- Michael Oltz]
Poor usability and accessibility are a significant signicant barrier for community source
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- Start with a heuristic and usability reviews
- Establish a baseline for usabillity and accessibility
- Know where we need to improve
- Prioritize the pain points
- Designer's Toolkit: shared design resources
- Personas and profiles
- Scenarios
- UI Design patterns (presenter considers this the best book: Jennifer Tidwell, Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design from O'Reilly, 2005.)
- U-Camps
- Iterative UI design and testing
Colin showed and spoke about a flowchart "Component Lifecycle" the process that will be taken with respect to each platform.
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Components are more than widgets
What does FLUID mean in a Portal environment?
Components capture recurring patterns
Reuse: UI layer consistency
Con Can be reused across differrent portlets
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Focus on uP3: JSR-168 for uP2 support?
A bit about the technology
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Based on JavaScript, DHTML, and AjaxAJAX
Thin binding layer between client and RESTful RESTful, largely stateless server
Also advanced customization based on user preferences
FLUID Accessibility
Ajax Colin believes that AJAX will be accessible; it's just a matter of time
ARIA standard: Accessible Rich Intnernet Application (W3C)
AccssForAll AccessForAll for component metadata
Ongoing tooklit accesibility accessibility support
Design specific alternatives
FLUID: Accessibility from the ground up
Ideas for components that FLUID could implement
Resource organization
-- Drag and drop
-- Folders and hierarchies
-- reordering and rearranging
navigationNavigation
breacrumbs
pagin
-- breadcrumbs
-- paging
-- affordances for external content
Composite, domain-specific:
-- Users, groups, permissions
-- Calendar
Add your suggestions here
Flexibility and Customization
FLUID wil be a highly flexible UI layer
At configuratinconfiguration-time:
-- Appearance, branding, style, page text
-- Locale, reading level, density
-- Functionality and user experience
At run-time:
-- Swap in accessible controls
-- Re-styling for higher contrast,etc.
-- Components built for specific disciplines or user needs
A The next slide was a diagram of what the pieces of Configuration-time flexibility would look likewould be and their relationship to each other
Another diagram of how they will transform would be used to transform [in the software development sense of the word] the user interface
Core Architecture
- Component framework
- Repository of shared components
- Semantics and specifications
- Integration
Component framework
- Component model and APIs
- JavaScript, CSS, HTML
- Component container
- JavaScript, AJAX toolkit integration
- Runtime Transformation Engine
- Finds and aggregates alternatives
- Server-side binding layer
- REST-based specificatoin + implementation
- REST-based specificatoin + implementation
Integration of FLUID components with any particular project
- Early and often
- Heuristics to measure improvements
- Project integration as soon as possible
- Requires regular collaboration with
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- the developers of the various projects
- Litmus test of project usefulness
Criteria for Initial Components
- Align with project needs/priorities
- Simple, known design
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- Complex technically [therefore worth doing, and robust test cases]
- Test AJAX accessibility
- Generalizable
- Addresses "pain point"
- Accessible alternatives
- Learn early!
Jonathan: How will you prioritize the "pain points"?
Colin: We will rely on interaction with the design team, then ask the respective user community what it thinks.
Milestones
- Choose Technology frameworks: May
- Evaluate technology in practice
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- Develop real componenets with candidate technologies
- Create prototype image gallery components
- Design,
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- develop, integrate, test, iterate
- Create accessible alternatives or equivalents
- Find other components to get started with
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- Aim for a demo at the June conferences of JA-SIG and Sakai
First component: Drag and Drop
- Image Gallery: a mini iPhoto for the Web
- Currently a simple tool written in RSF
- Some clear UX problems to solve
- No way to re-order or sort images in albums
- Plans
- Build components for reorganizing images
- Move to JSR-168
- Create accessible equivalents
- Test in Sakai and uPortal
DnD Accessibility
- What does accessibility mean here?
- Keyboard access
- Low vision
- Single switch/on-screen keyboard
- Focus on the goal, not the task
- Re-ordering images
- Doesn't necessarily look like DnD
- What alternatives are available on the desktop?
- Cut and paste, etc.
- We're starting on research and testing to find out the best alternative solutions
Ideas for uPortal Starting POintsPoints
- Jen's drag and drop preferences?
- Help with interaction desgin & testing
- Imrpovements to tab editing
- Refactor to FLUID components
- Accessibility support & alternatives
- uP3 framework?
- Administrative tools
- Other interfaces Eric & co are working on
Susan: Let's get a near-term decision for the non-JavaScript enabled. Which of the currently bad alternatives is the most reasonable?
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Jason: It looks like we're going to have stateful components on the client side, in which case reinitializing the session by refreshing the page would mess up things.
Roy Fielding's dissertation on the architecture of the web was mentioned; that's where he coined the term "REST".
Summary
Design and development work is ramping up
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Join our community, we need your input!
QUestions Qyestions and Discussion
Ideas for starting points in uPortal
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uP3 framework
Challenges of Ajax AJAX in portlets
Ajax AJAX toolkit preferences?
Architectural suggestions
Jen: It would be tough right now to add Drag and Drop preferences to another theme, if this makes it easier that would be great.
Review of last two days and expectations of work between now and the conference.
by Eric Dalquist
[note-taker missed a couple points at beginning]
Functional integration testing.
[went Eric suggested let's go around the room]
ElliottElliot: My interest is in working on uPortal 3
Chris: Consolidating efforts with existing portlets and channels and making it make sense.....
Theron Feist: still getting up to speed, interested in the UI enhancements. Getting more portlets out of the box.
Andrew: on the hook to prepare for a couple presentations. I expect there will be a build of 2.6 with some name. We have a Professional Services Group at Unicon. Andrew is I'm in the development software engineering group, and he expects not the services group. I except that there will continue to be development work from the services group but cannot commit them to anything in particular. The developer's uPortal manual idea from Jason is a great idea, it deserves some work.
Jonathan: Talk to Chris Coppola about the licensing issues. Work with Andrew Petro to prepare announcements and marketing stuff for 2.6 release. The manual is a very high priority deliverable. Working on various conference preparation activities. Planning around formation of project steering committee. etc.
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Jonathan: We should have a bar-camp session on Wednesday afternoon afternoon of this summer's conference ("BOF sessions").