Newsletter - 200908 - August 2009

Owned by Mark Mark
Last updated: Aug 25, 2009Version comment
12 min read

Jasig Newsletter - August 2009

==================================

1 Upcoming Events

1.1 Jasig Fall 2009 Unconference - Champaign, Illinois (September 28 - October 2, 2009)
1.2 EDUCAUSE 2009 Annual Conference - Denver, Colorado (November 3-6, 2009)
1.3 Kuali Days VIII Announced! - San Antonio, Texas (November 17 and 18, 2009)

2 Jasig Project Updates

2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)
2.1.1 CAS Client
2.1.2 CAS Steering Committee
2.1.3 OpenRegistry
2.2 uPortal
2.2.1 uPortal at the Jasig Unconference
2.2.2 Portlet Release Manager Announcement

3 Jasig Incubator

3.1 Bedework Status Report

4 Around Jasig

4.1 Fort Lewis College live with uPortal 3.1.1
4.2 Virginia Tech live with uPortal 3.1.0
4.3 Infusion 1.1.1 Release
4.4 Portlet Development Training - Jasig Unconference

==================================

1 Upcoming Events

1.1 Jasig Fall 2009 Unconference - Champaign, Illinois

REGISTER NOW FOR THE JASIG FALL 2009 UNCONFERENCE at UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

  • Registration fee for the September 2009 Jasig Unconference: $225/Members, $275/Non-Members
  • Nightly rate at the iHotel and Conference Center: $119
  • Two-and-a-half days talking, learning, teaching, planning, designing, coding,
    and hanging out with your peers: Priceless!
  • REMINDER: Discounted rates at the Conference Center iHotel expire on Thursday, August 27th.

NEW INFORMATION: HOW TO REGISTER!

DATES:
September 28-30, Unconference sessions
October 1-2, Developer meetings

PLACE:
University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign
iHotel and Conference Center

REGISTRATION FEE:
$225 - Jasig Members
$275 - Non-Members
(Includes Breakfast, Mon/Tue Lunch, and Snacks)
Register here: https://www.concentra-cms.com/register/start.action?confId=43

ACCOMMODATIONS
iHotel and Conference Center
1900 South First Street, Champaign, IL 61820
$119/single/night
217.819.5000
Register online: www.stayatthei.com
Make sure you enter the Jasig attendee code to get the special rate: AJSG

WHAT'S AN UNCONFERENCE?!

"An unconference is a conference where the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants, generally day-by-day during the course of the event, rather than by a single organizer, or small group of organizers, in advance."
-Wikipedia

Jasig has always been about people coming together to share and learn in an open environment, and this is what an "unconference" is all about.

This fall event will provide both spontaneous and planned opportunities to collaborate on all Jasig community initiatives as well as initiatives from other community open source projects. This year we plan to continue discussions begun at the June Internet2/EDUCAUSE/Jasig Identity and Access Management ACAMP, as well.

Mark your calendar and make plans to join us! More information about the Unconference will be available soon.

WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?

It's up to you. Ideas people are talking about so far include the following:

Lightning Talks - Volunteers talk for up to 8 minutes. Any topic goes.
Workshops - Bring your uPortal, Portlet, CAS, Bedework, or IdM code or design or requirements and work on them with core developers.
Birds of a Feather Sessions - Discuss common interests, issues, problems with colleagues.

Strategic Planning - What should Jasig be focused on next year? In three years? Join the conversation.
Newbie? Meet the experts and get individualized help.
How-to's. How-not-to's. Tips and techniques.

The final schedule will be determined in real-time, interactively with the attendees.

SOUNDS LIKE AN OFFER I CAN'T REFUSE. WHAT SHOULD I DO NEXT?

If you're planning to join us, please do the following:

  1. Register for the Unconference right here: https://www.concentra-cms.com/register/start.action?confId=43
  2. Visit and Add your Name on the Unconference Planning Site on the Jasig wiki. This is a great place to indicate your interests---what you'd like to discuss, learn, share or teach: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/O4eUAQ
  3. Reserve a room online at the iHotel and Conference Center:
    Register online by August 27th: http://www.stayatthei.com
    Make sure you enter the Jasig attendee code to get the group rate: AJSG
    More info can be found here: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/QYeUAQ
  4. Make travel arrangements. Tips are available here: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/QoeUAQ

See you at the Jasig Unconference,
The Fall 2009 Unconference Organizers

1.2 EDUCAUSE 2009 Annual Conference - Denver, Colorado (November 3-6, 2009)

"We are living in challenging times, when the need for uncommon thinking is unprecedented. You have told us you look to EDUCAUSE for insight, thought leadership, and community interaction. One event delivers all this, and more: the EDUCAUSE 2009 Annual Conference, where you will be able to tap into an expansive pool of the best thinking in higher education IT. Maximize the value of your travel dollars and join us November 3-6, 2009 in Denver, Colorado. We're offering the richest member-driven program ever, keenly focused on providing you with the kind of tangible value you can take back to campus and use all year long:

  • More perspectives and insight: lightning rounds built into every track.
  • More global viewpoints: a 100% increase in sessions featuring international speakers.
  • More diversity of opinion: increased numbers of sessions spotlighting multiple presenters.
  • More networking with a purpose: hundreds of discussion opportunities to facilitate future collaboration.
  • More focus on the most complex issues: cloud computing; emerging technologies; distributed, cooperative, and blended learning environments; the latest on P2P regulations; green and sustainable IT; and much more."

Reference: http://net.educause.edu/e09/
Latest: http://educause.informz.net/educause/archives/archive_374256.html
Podcast: http://www.educause.edu/blog/gbayne/PodcastFirstLookattheEDUCAUSE2/173425

1.3 Kuali Days VIII Announced! - San Antonio, Texas (November 17 and 18, 2009)

"The Kuali Foundation is pleased to announce the dates and location for the Kuali Days VIII conference. Kuali Days VIII will be held on November 17 and 18, 2009 in San Antonio, TX. In addition to the Kuali Days VIII conference event, there will be pre-conference sessions, community meetings, and other networking activities.

Once again, there will be multiple tracks available to attendees. The Program Chair and Track Chairs are working diligently on putting together another excellent program. We are doing our best to hold down costs this year to address budget constraints, so we can maximize the ability for community members, project partners, and potential members to attend this event."

Source: kuali.org - http://www.kuali.org/news/2009/05142009.html

2 Jasig Project Updates

2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)

2.1.1 CAS Client

The Jasig CAS Client for Java 3.1.7 was released to the public Maven2 Repositories recently. This release includes a few minor changes:

  • Safe Request Parameter checking - Allows you to put a CAS filter in front of something that reads from the input stream.
  • Fix for Proxy Support - Proxy Chains from the web.xml would not parse properly (but Spring support was fine)
  • CAS Login Url Construction now allows for non-standard parameters to be included
<dependency>
   <groupId>org.jasig.cas</groupId>
   <artifactId>cas-client-core</artifactId>
   <version>3.1.7</version>
   <type>jar</type>
   <scope>runtime</scope>
</dependency>

Note, the scope should be "compile" if you're using the CAS Client APIs.

2.1.2 CAS Steering Committee

The CAS Steering Committee welcomes its two new members: Andrew Petro and Andrew Feller, welcomes back Eric Pierce, and thanks Troy Bull and David Whitehurst for their time on the committee. In addition, the committee approved a recent change to its bylaws to elect the committee chairperson for a one-year term.

The steering committee is currently working on a number of tasks including working with Unicon on some CAS marketing material and defining volunteer roles and positions that community members can fill to gain experience working with an open source project.

2.1.3 OpenRegistry

OpenRegistry is gearing up for its first release, version 0.1. The use cases covered this release can be found here:

The roadmap for the Version 0.1 Release can be found here:

Any feedback or questions should be directed towards the OpenRegistry Development List:

2.2 uPortal

2.2.1 uPortal at the Jasig Unconference

There will be plenty of opportunities to raise your uPortal technical questions and issues at the fall Unconference.  In addition, the uPortal Steering Committee has come up with a few topics of interest:

  • What do people want out of improved uPortal testing?
  • What we want in a user manual?
  • Solicit content for our Fall Webinar Series (i.e., portal tours, portlet show-and-tell, etc.)
  • What would people like to see in a Jasig portlet bundle?
  • What would be a good format for a uPortal road map--one that reflects our strategic direction for uPortal ERP integration, especially Banner portlets and how we should coordinate efforts

We'd love to hear your thoughts on these and other topics.  We hope to see you at the Unconference!

2.2.2 Portlet Release Manager Announcement

Last year Jasig began to focus more directly on encouraging collaboration among institutions for the purpose of contributing to a free, open source library of shared portlets. We currently have a number of such portlets in incubation and available for production use.

Our goal is to add to these portlets, to provide a robust infrastructure for their development, to ensure that the portlets continue to be maintained, and to keep them portable across all standards compliant portals. Our hope is that we will attract work that is particularly useful for higher education institutions, including portlets that feature integration with a number of external campus systems.

To assist developers in working towards these ends we have recently created a volunteer position of "Portlet Release Manager" with the following responsibilities:

  • Help define, review, and document release requirements and best practices for adopted Jasig portlets
  • Help define, review, and document portlet development best practices to encourage implementation of JSR-168/JSR-286 standards and compatibility with multiple portlet containers and versions
  • Assist developers in transitioning their portlets from incubation to sponsorship
  • Assist developers in effectively using Jasig portlet project resources such as the Jasig parent POM and maven repository
  • Coordinate with the uPortal release manager, developers, and Steering Committee to recommend and update the portlets and portlet versions shipped with uPortal releases
  • As the community defines requirements for a standalone portlet bundle, assist with managing and releasing that hypothetical future product

We are very pleased to announce that Jen Bourey, from Unicon, has agreed to serve as Jasig Portlet Release Manager. Jen has been active in the uPortal community for a number of years, both while at Yale University and in her current position at Unicon. She has been a uPortal committer, a portlet author, and someone who has generously offered support on our lists to both uPortal implementors and portlet developers.

Jen will be monitoring the portlet-user and portlet-dev lists. If you would like information about making a contribution or if you have any questions about our portlet efforts, please direct them to the appropriate list.

Jonathan Markow, Executive Director

See also: http://www.unicon.net/node/1286

Contributed by: The uPortal Steering Committee

3 Jasig Incubator

3.1 Bedework Status Report

As the summer draws to a close, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, I would like to report on recent Bedework and Bedework-related developments since our Bedework 3.5 announcement last month.

Bedework inquiries and adoption
-------------------------------
Yale University's Bedework deployment, http://calendar.yale.edu/, went production on August 5th. Congratulations to Eric Wittmann and the rest of the Yale implementation/deployment team for this very fine work. We will have more to say about Yale later in this update.

We continue to receive inquiries, some which you see on the mailing lists, about Bedework. It is heartening to learn that often those who contact us have first contacted those of you who have already deployed Bedework.

Internationalization support
----------------------------
Last month we introduced Barry Leibson, a former RPI colleague of ours who is working with us on internationalizing web client strings. Barry has just about completed that work, which means we can begin integrating it for the Bedework 3.6 distribution.

2-3-98 Conference at SUNY Delhi
-------------------------------
Arlen and I attended, and presented at, the second annual 2-3-98 conference. Patrick Masson, the CIO at the State University of New York at Delhi, put together an even better program this year. We have the opportunity to speak with many people about Bedework, and open source. Jonathan Markow, Jasig executive director, gave a presentation on Jasig's latest incubation project, ESUP Help Desk (http://www.esup-portail.org/display/PROJHELPDESK/esup-helpdesk+-+user+support+at+establishment-level). We at RPI have a test deployment of ESUP Helpdesk, and it looks very promising.

Jasig's "Unconference"
----------------------
As we noted last month, we will be participating in Jasig's "Unconference" (http://www.jasig.org/jasig-unconference-coming) at University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign, the week of September 28th. We participated last year, even before we had joined as members of Jasig, and found it very productive and enjoyable. Note that the guaranteed room rate expires on 8/27.

Yale and Duke "skin" discussions
--------------------------------
A number of you have remarked how much you like the look and feel of Duke's Bedework deployment, as do we. As Arlen noted earlier on these lists, Yale has enhanced Duke's skin, and made it more generic for easier deployment by other Bedework sites. We have been talking with both Yale and Duke about making this work available in Bedework 3.6. Once Yale has executed the Contributor's Agreement (http://www.bedework.org/downloads/webcontent/BedeworkLicenseAgrmt.pdf ) we will be able to freely collaborate on integrating this work into the Bedework distribution.

LMS and Bedework
----------------
For some time we have had an interest in seeing Bedework integrated with an open source LMS such as Sakai or Moodle. (RPI itself presently uses a proprietary LMS product). Recently we have had discussions, both informal and a little more formal, about exploring these opportunities. Hopefully we will have more concrete news to share in the near future.

ZideOne Outlook Connector
-------------------------
I have mentioned the ZideOne Outlook plug-in previously on these lists. We have continued to work with Helge Hess, the lead ZideOne developer, on accessing Bedework calendars from Outlook. I recently downloaded a calendar from mets.com (the web site of what was once a Major League Baseball team), imported it into a slightly pre-release 3.5 version of Bedework, and viewed and modified it from Outlook 2007. ZideOne installation and configuration are now pretty straightforward, and the stability of this still beta version of ZideOne has been good. We have noticed an anomaly with recurring events which we are discussing with Helge, which hopefully we will be able to solve.

If you have a Bedework 3.5 deployment, it is worth taking a look at ZideOne (zideone.com).

Smart Grid
----------
Mike Douglass and I attended a NIST-hosted workshop interoperability standards roadmap for the U.S. Smart Grid, on August 3-4. We attended as representatives of CalConnect. Dave Thewlis, Executive Director of CalConnect, had intended to lead to CalConnect delegation, but had to withdraw due to illness.

CalConnect's invitation to participate resulted from the consortium's interactions and discussions with Toby Considine, Chair, Technical Advisory Board at OASIS, Chair oBIX Technical Committee at OASIS, infrastructure Analyst at UNC Chapel Hill. In his capacity as oBIX Technical Committee Chair, Toby contacted CalConnect while searching for a Web Services standard for calendaring (which does not yet exist).

The workshop consisted of plenary sessions, with speakers such as Dr. George Arnold, National Coordinator for Smart Grid Interoperability, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Aneesh Chopra, the first Chief Technology Officer, of the United States. There was a panel discussion with representatives from 20+ SDOs represented at the workshop. Each day ended with a plenary status session.

Mike and I were among the session co-leaders at the "scheduling" breakout on Monday. "The co-leaders shall concentrate together on the Priority Action Plans (PAPs), while a facilitator shall coordinate with the general attendees to ask questions or make comments in a reasonable, moderated fashion. ..."

Toby Considine's blog, http://www.newdaedalus.com/, is very informative in a number of respects, but two recent postings deal with discussion topics from the workshop, http://www.newdaedalus.com/articles/2009/8/4/the-price-of-energy.html
, and http://www.newdaedalus.com/articles/2009/8/3/monday-morning-at-the-smart-grid-sdo-workshop.html
(in which I am "Greg Schwartz").

CalConnect is now discussing how best to participate, and hopefully I will be able to report next month on the action items from these discussions. Mike and I were delighted to be able to participate, but we were equally surprised as to where calendaring and Bedework have taken us.

The main NIST Smart Grid web site is at http://nist.gov/smartgrid/. There is an associated wiki at http://collaborate.nist.gov/twiki-sggrid/bin/view/SmartGrid/WebHome.

Bedework 3.6
--------------
A number of you have asked, both on the lists and privately, when you might expect to see Bedework 3.6. We hope to have Bedework 3.6 released in early November 2009.

On behalf of the Bedework development team,
Gary Schwartz

4 Around Jasig

4.1 Fort Lewis College live with uPortal 3.1.1

Fort Lewis College (https://thefort.fortlewis.edu ) successfully upgraded from uPortal 3.0.1 to 3.1.1 on Saturday, August 15th.

James Bodine
Manager, Web Services & Middleware
Fort Lewis College - Information Technology

4.2 Virginia Tech live with uPortal 3.1.0

Virginia Tech successfully went live on Sunday, August 16, 2009 with a new version of My VT (https://my.vt.edu/) based on uPortal 3.1.0.

Ken McCrery
Manager, Integration & Portal Services
Enterprise Systems | Virginia Tech

4.3 Infusion 1.1.1 Release

The Fluid Project is very pleased to announce the release of Fluid Infusion 1.1.1

This release covers several bug fixes to the framework and components, focusing mostly on the Inline Edit and Reorderer components. Infusion 1.1.1 is an incremental upgrade and preserves backwards compatibility for all production-grade components.

Infusion 1.1.1 is available for download at:

http://fluidproject.org/index.php/download-infusion

What's New in This Release?

Since this is a maintenance release, nothing new has been added. Rather, several bugs have been addressed including:

  1. Text inside inline editor is being lost after canceling the text edit.
  2. Typing "Click here to edit" is equivalent to erasing all the text
  3. Item will drop to the right of an element when it should have dropped at the left.
  4. tiny_mce Inline Edit text editor fails when used with advanced theme
  5. Can't select text: using IE

And several others. See the complete list here: http://issues.fluidproject.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?mode=hide&requestId=10252

If you're upgrading from Infusion 1.0, please see:
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Upgrading+to+Infusion+1.1
If upgrading from an earlier version of Infusion you may want to refer to the following Upgrade guides:
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Upgrading+to+Infusion+1.0

What is Fluid Infusion?

Fluid Infusion is a JavaScript application framework for building rich, reusable, and accessible user interfaces on the Web. It includes all the tools you need for building complex interactions, including support for models and views, data binding, and unobtrusive markup rendering. Infusion also includes a growing collection of components that have been designed by a cross-disciplinary team and thoroughly tested for usability and accessibility. By incorporating the Infusion framework and components into your web application's user interface, you will make your application easier to use by more people. Easier to use means happier users.

Known Issues

An up-to-date listing of known issues with this release is available at: http://issues.fluidproject.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?mode=hide&requestId=10251

Help us Build a Usable Web For Everyone

The Fluid Project is an open, collaborative community. Our goal is to improve the user experience of open source web applications, so if you are a designer or developer and want to help change the world, consider getting involved! Fluid Infusion includes not only full source code but also a design handbook that offers useful design, accessibility, and usability strategies and documentation, all backed by a growing community of interaction designers, user interface experts, and software developers contributing a wealth of expertise in usability and accessibility.

Many thanks to everyone in the community for their hard work and support for this release!

Jacob Farber
www.Fluidproject.org

4.4 Portlet Development Training - Jasig Unconference

Unicon is pleased to offer a portlet development training class coinciding with the Jasig Unconference. This training class educates about the functionality and capabilities of Java portlets and how to develop them. The timing and location of this class gives conference attendees an opportunity to leverage their Jasig Unconference travel expenses.

When: Wednesday, September 30 - Friday, October 2, 2009
Where: iHotel and Conference Center, University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign, Champaign, Illinois

For full details, see the Unicon announcement at http://www.unicon.net/node/1149

==================================

Jasig Newsletter - August 2009

Archives available in the Jasig wiki at: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/Newsletter

If your institution or company has items of interest to the Jasig membership, please submit them via email to newsletter at jasig dot org.

The next issue of the monthly Jasig Newsletter will be published on or about September 22nd, 2009. Articles for that edition of the newsletter should be submitted no later than Monday, September 21st, 2009. Thanks!

==================================