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Overview
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uPortal 2.6 |
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is seriously old. Consider adopting or upgrading to a modern uPortal release instead. uPortal 2.6 is |
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There was a presentation about uPortal 2.6 at the March 2005 Developers' meeting in LA.
Release goals
What are we looking for from a uPortal 2.6 release? What could we achieve in uPortal 2.6 that would make deployers very interested in redeploying on a uPortal 2.6?
The following outlines some goals we might adopt for this release. What will actually be accomplished will be driven by interest in doing this work.
Stability, Stability, Stability
One important continuing issue in the uPortal 2.x codebase is stability in terms of bugfixes and memory leaks. Rutgers has applied significant resources to tracking down memory leaks and related bugs.
Skinning
Jason Shao of Rutgers has posted thoughts and a proposed process for imporving the skinnability and potentially the default look and feel of uPortal, to better use technologies like divs and css. This effort will likely have deliverables in the 2.6 timeframe.
Layout Management
Among the most cxciting contributions to 2.5 is SunGard SCT's DLM alternative layout management from their Luminis product, which is based upon uPortal.
Looking towards the 2.6 timeframe, we may see synergies between the alternative layout managers. Another place for improvement here is in enabling programmatic creation of layout fragments. Sources for layout information may extend beyond databases and XML files to enable such things as a runtime interrogation of a CMS for generating layout portions presenting appropriate managed content.
Nested tabs
As more content becomes available, we may need more screen real estate upon which to present it. Nested tabs and even more tree-like skins for uPortal may be the way to achieve this. Nested tabs have already been implemented by schools such as Virginia Tech. Even more schools may be able to take advantage of this approach if uPortal includes transforms/skins out of the box demonstrating more advanced presentations than the current tab-column approach.
WSRP Consumption
As more compelling WSRP producers come online, our WSRP consumer may need to become more sophisticated than what we currently use. We currently used a hacked version of the WSRP4j proxyportlet.
Sakai integration work
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the first version to require JDK 1.5, other features include DLM as the default layout manager, Drag and Drop user preferences option and a DIV & CSS centric skin. |
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uPortal 2.6 is seriously old. Consider adopting or upgrading to a modern uPortal release instead. |
Requirements
uPortal 2.6 requires JDK 1.5 or later. It may run under JDK 1.6 but support for JDK 1.6 is not a primary goal of the uPortal 2.6.0 initial release (instead focusing on getting JDK 1.5 support right.)
Release Notes
Hangups – Changes in 2.6 that might trip you up
- PersonDirs.xml is no longer parsed or honored by default. Use of PersonDirs.xml, which no longer ships as a file with uPortal as of 2.6, can be easily restored via configuration in personDirectory.xml.
- DLM is now the default layout manager. If you were relying on something else to be the default, you'll need to either migrate to using DLM (recommended and preferred) or be sure to point 2.6.1 at existing or otherwise suitable configuration instructing it to use the non-DLM layout management scheme you're looking to use. (DLM was one of the available layout management schemes in 2.5
- ALM is deprecated and will be removed from availability in a near future release*
2.6-export.1 - Detailed Release notes
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2.6.1 - Detailed Release notes
Fixes in 2.6.1
- The initportal and deployPortletApp Ant targets function correctly without an internet connection.
- ALM cyclical reference handling.
Enhancements in 2.6.1
- Statistics are only logged instead of logged and written to System.out
- Unsafe HTML elements are now filtered by the CSynFeed channel.
2.6.0 - Detailed Release notes
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)
Miscellaneous Notes
There was a presentation about uPortal 2.6 at the March 2005 Developers' meeting in LA.