Jasig is proud to announce the release of uPortal 4.0, the latest version of the leading portal framework developed by and for Higher Education! This major release supports version 2.0 of the Portlet specification (JSR-286), removes IChannel support, includes a new customization UI and updated UIs for groups, permissions and user management. New 'under the hood' features such as a refactored rendering pipeline also improve speed and memory usage of the portal.
What's new in 4.0
Portlet 2.0 Support
- Inter-Portlet Communication via Events
- Resource request support for AJAX and binary content delivery
- ETag based caching support including browser-side ETag pass-through for resource URLs
- IChannel support has been removed
UI Improvements
- New unified layout management interface
- Users may subscribe to optional pre-packaged tabs
- Default skin updated with a clean, modern look and feel
- Provides a better starting point for custom skin development
Mobile Support
- Updated mobile theme with jQuery Mobile support
- uMobile native app framework connection features included out of the box
Internationalization
- New unified message file for all view types
- Minor i18n support improvements all over the framework
Integration
- New Grouper group service implementation allows use of Grouper groups within uPortal
- CAS Clearpass features and sample implementation included in build
- Portlet Event based searching allowing any portlet to contribute search results to the uPortal Search dialog
New portlets bundled with uPortal
- News/RSS
- Google Gadgets
Data Import/Export
- Portal data file formats defined by XML Schemas
- Simplified import/export code using JAXB
Administrative Tools
- New user interface for groups and permissions administration
- Delegate administration of groups and permissions
- Unified user management tool that integrates attribute management for local users, swapper utilities, and limited password-reset support.
Rendering Pipeline
- Using StAX and XSLTc for improved performance
- Broken out into bite-size components which can be mixed, matched, and quickly customized
- Allows for multiple pipelines with different uses. Two are included, the primary pipeline and a JSON pipeline used by uMobile
Portlet Execution Management
- Stack trace of a portlet is logged when it times out
- The current portlet fname and request type is included in the thread name during portlet execution
- Background cleanup of hung portlets to prevent resource leaks
For complete release notes, see https://wiki.jasig.org/display/UPC/4.0.