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For beyond uPortal project

What's special about this flavor of the announcement

This one's less technical and is targeted for folks who may not be familiar with uPortal.

Title: uPortal 4.0 Now Available!

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! uPortal is a powerful, flexible, scalable, standards based open source enterprise integration portal platform enabling personalization, customization, and integration. This major release supports version 2.0 of the Portlet specification (JSR-286), includes new customization, groups, permissions and user management UIs. 'Under the hood' improvements in the rendering pipeline and caching improve speed and memory usage of the portal. uPortal is a built by Higher Education for Higher Education.

uPortal 4, including a quick-start distribution, is available for download at http://www.jasig.org/uportal/download/uportal-400. Features, benefits and support information is available at http://www.uportal.org.

What's new in uPortal 4.0

Portlet 2.0 Support

uPortal 4 supports Portlet 2.0 (JSR-286), implementing inter-portlet communication via events, resource URLs for AJAX, and the other requirements of the specification. This means that adopters can build custom portlets using the latest portlet development techniques and frameworks, including the latest Spring Portlet MVC and Spring Web Flow releases (and thereby take advantage of Spring 3). This is a tremendous step forward in the portlet development APIs afforded to adopters.

Google Gadgets support

uPortal 4 also ships demonstrating inclusion of Google Gadgets in the portal, affording an API totally different from JSR-286 for developing custom portal-delivered experiences.

UI Improvements

uPortal 4 ships with improved out of the box user experiences for layout management and administration, and provides a better starting point for custom skin development.

Mobile Support

uPortal 4 ships delivering traditional desktop browser as well as mobile browser appropriate markup with jQuery Mobile support. uPortal 4 also supports the optional free and open source uMobile native mobile applications. This makes uPortal 4 a viable platform for delivering mobile browser experiences out of the box, and provides a path to even richer native mobile application experiences.

Internationalization

uMobile 4 ships with a new unified message file approach to internationalization support and improved i18n support throughout.

Integration

uPortal has long offered flexible and pluggable groups service, and now ships with support for using Grouper groups within uPortal. uPortal has long offered excellent CAS support, including support for using CAS proxy tickets in portlets, and now ships demonstrating this, as well as integration with the ClearPass CAS extension providing optional support for making the end user password available to portlets concurrently with use of CAS. Portlet Event based searching allows any portlet to contribute search results to the uPortal Search dialog.

Data Import/Export

uPortal 4 provides improved data import/export formats, definitions, and improved support for executing on these imports and exports.

Administrative Tools

uPortal 4 ships with improved administrative tools supporting delegated administration of groups and permissions, as well as management of portal-local users.

Performance (and flexibility)

A refactored rendering pipeline affords greater modularity and flexibility, but uPortal 4 demonstrates the potential in this out of the box by leveraging that flexibility to provide better-performing smarter-caching implementations of rendering pipeline components. uPortal 4 is faster and better under the hood.

Portlet Execution Management

uPortal 4 doesn't just support the latest portlet APIs, it provides great support for these APIs, with an execution environment that provides helpful debugging information when portlets time out or fail and which cleans up after portlets even when they won't clean up after themselves. This makes uPortal 4 a more supportive development environment and platform for delivering your custom portlets.

For more information the features and benefits of uPortal, see http://www.uportal.org.

For within uPortal project

What's special about this flavor of the announcement

This one's more technical and is targeted at folks already familiar with uPortal.
Suitable for posting to uportal-user@ and uportal-dev@ email lists, e.g.

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.

uPortal 4, including a quick-start distribution, is available for download at http://www.jasig.org/uportal/download/uportal-400.

What's new in uPortal 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.

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