Released Apr 17, 2008
3.0.0 GA announcement
JA-SIG is proud to announce the General Audience release of uPortal 3.0.0. uPortal 3.0.0 GA is the culmination of a significant effort by many people in the uPortal community to take a revolutionary step with the uPortal code base.
Full release notes are available along with a uPortal 3.0 release overview. The release notes page includes links to the milestone and two release candidates that preceded this GA release.
This release includes the following new features and fixes:
- A standard project structure and build management system using Maven 2 with Ant utility scripts.
- Use of the Pluto 1.1 portlet container which provides future-proofing for eventual JSR-286 support.
- A single Spring application context with much of the portal application configuration residing in this context.
- Database import and export utilities using Cernunnos scripts. Thanks to Andrew Wills from Unicon for this work.
- A new theme and skin along with a more understandable directory structure for layout and skin related files. The new skin is also using jQuery to provide drag and drop features which are enabled by default. Thanks to Gary Thompson from Unicon and Jen Bourey from Yale for this work.
- Layout cache friendly dynamic title support for channels and portlets. Dynamic titles for channels and portlets work on every render now. Thanks to Nick Bolton from Unicon for this work.
- Quickstart generation scripts. Quickstart generation is now as simple as running an Ant task.
- Consistent cache scheme and configuration based on Spring-Modules Caching API. Most existing dynamic caches have been converted to use the new API and it is currently backed by EHCache though other caching frameworks can easily be used.
- CAS 3.2 is bundled with uPortal and is used as the default authentication mechanism. Thanks to Scott Battaglia from Rutgers, Andrew Petro from Unicon and Jen Bourey from Yale for this work.
- CAS Proxy tickets are available to JSR-168 portlets as a user attribute. Thanks to Jen Bourey from Yale for this work.
- New default content that provides a better first-impression and demonstration of the uPortal framework.
- Over 150 bugs, improvements, new features, and tasks resolved since 2.6
Source and Quick Start downloads are available on the uPortal All Release page. JavaDocs and developer-centric materials are available on the project's Maven site
This release is ready for general use. If you do find any issues please file them in the JA-SIG Issue Tracker
I want to thank everyone who contributed to the development both directly and in-directly. Having this developer community available for both code and design insight has been invaluable.
A more press-release centric announcement will follow tomorrow on the uportal-user and other lists along with the uPortal web-site and other locations.
uPortal 3.0.0 Release Engineer,
-Eric Dalquist
Release Summary
Enhancements in 3.0.0 not present in any 2.6.x release
- Maven 2 build management system which provides dependency management, build, test, and packaging functionality. An integrated Ant build script is also included to support all of the necessary Ant tasks from previous uPortal versions.
- A single, consolidated Spring application context has been created and all new development for the framework is being done in a managed Inversion of Control fashion. This includes refactoring of some uPortal service classes and factories to provide the implementations via the Spring application context.
- Deprecated code removal. Much of the code marked as deprecated in uPortal 2.6 has been removed and legacy static factory classes are being marked as deprecated where appropriate.
- Aggregated Layout Manager (ALM) has been removed from the uPortal 3.0 code base. The ALM code has been moved into the contrib directory in version control to allow interested parties to continue development against the code.
- Switch to the stand alone Person Directory library. The Person Directory code has been removed from uPortal and replaced with the API compatible stand-alone version of the code.
- Upgraded to Pluto 1.1. This change involved removing and re-writing all JSR-168 portlet support code. This change provides more complete portlet support and aligns uPortal with the Pluto JSR-286 work.
- Refactored rendering pipeline and channel rendering management code removing many instance scoped variables in favor of request attributes.
- Moved all URL processing code into a dedicated request parameter processing pipeline which executes before the rendering pipeline starts.
- A new XHTML/CSS based theme and skin that has a straight-forward directory and file structure.
- Revised default content that better demonstrates the features and functionality of uPortal.
Enhancements in 3.0.0 that may also appear in a 2.6.x release
- Data import and export tools. Andrew Wills has provided Cernunnos based scripts to import and export all uPortal data. These scripts provide a data migration patch when upgrading between versions of uPortal including uPortal 2.5 or 2.6 to 3.0
Bugs known to afflict uPortal 3.0.0 GA
Issues addressed in uPortal 3.0.0 GA
(Note that this is in addition to issues addressed in uPortal 3.0.0 milestone 5, release candidate two, and release candidate three.)