uPortal 101

An element of the uP101 pre-conference seminar

This page is not intended to be a general documentation of uPortal configuration. It is the specific ramblings that will be presented at the JA-SIG Vancouver uPortal 101 pre-conference seminar.

During the course of this half-day workshop participants will be walked through the basics behind getting uPortal 2.5 up and running.

Setup

Please complete the steps on the setup page before the seminar to actively run examples.

Seminar Topics

Building uPortal (15 minutes Susan)

The first step is to create an Eclipse project for our work in uPortal. There are two options:
- If you already are familiar with the mechanics of creating a new eclipse project from CVS you can do so from the JA-SIG repository on developer.jasig.org. Use the branch labeled uPortal 101 Vancouver.
- If you are not familiar with creating a Java project from CVS you can
  - download uPortal-101-proj.zip or copy from the CD.
  - expand it into a writeable area on your laptop (such as your hard disk.)
  - use eclipse File>Import... and select "Exising Projects into Workspace" to create the project from the expanded archive.
- Open build.properties and set server.home to the Tomcat home where you installed Tomcat. For example: \uPortal-101\JavaClasses\jakarta-tomcat-5.0.28. This is the same value you set in Eclipse Window>Preferences>Tomcat>Tomcat Home.
- Right click on build.xml and select "run as..." to run ant and select the target "deploy".

If all is well this will copy all required uPortal components to the Tomcat webapps directory. Congratulations. You have deployed the uPortal application! But it is not going to run yet.

A word about JAXP, DOM3, xalan and JDK versions. If you need to run uPortal under jdk 1.4 read Andrew's guide at http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/UPC/Practical+uP25+XML+Changes.

Since we are running this workshop under JDK 5.0 Update 6 we must remove (!) two jar files distributed with Tomcat 5.0.28. To do this go to jakarta-tomcat-5.0.28/common/endorsed and delete (or move) xml-apis.jar and xercesImpl.jar.

Logging and log settings (10 Andrew)

Logging is fun, useful, and effective. It's also powerfully configurable. Logging as discussed in this seminar.

Configuration and customization for your site (10 Andrew)

Some components use Spring most still use properties
ApplicationContext.xml, checkers and issues with XML libraries and Java versions

uPortal Database Configuration (15 Susan)

uPortal 101 Start it up! (5 Susan)

Authentication configuration (20 Andrew)

Simple
CAS (proxy granting tickets)
Others (LDAP?)

uP101 User Attributes and Person Directory Configuration (20 Susan)

Total 1 hour 35 minutes
15 minute break

uP101 Groups Management (20 Susan)

Channels (20-30? Andrew)

IChannel and channel types
Channel Manager user interface
Chanpub and xml channel definitions
Channel Publishing Documents for new channel types
Portlet support
Support for WSRP
Use of IPerson and proxy CAS

uP101 Layout management and Content Provision (20 Susan)

Stats recording (10-15 Andrew)

Available recorders
database stats recorder?

Total 1 hour 20 minutes
15-20 minutes additional questions