Newsletter - 201001 - January 2010

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1.1 Jasig 2010 Early Registration Ends Jan 31!
1.2 MySQL Conference and Expo - Santa Clara, California (April 12-15, 2010)
1.3 11th Sakai Conference - Denver, Colorado, USA (June 2010)
1.4 The 2010 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World - Boston, Massachusetts (June 22-25, 2010)
1.5 OSCON 2010 Open Source Convention - Portland, Oregon (July 19-23, 2010)

2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)
2.1.1 CAS Roadmap Updated
2.2 uPortal
2.2.1 uPortal Opportunities at the Spring Conference
2.2.2 uPortal 3.2.0-RC2 Released
2.2.3 February uPortal Community Call
2.2.4 Future uPortal Community Calls

3.1 Bedework 3.6 RC1 now available for download
3.2 OpenRegistry 0.1-M4 Release

4.1 Greg Jackson Will Speak on Sustaining Open Source in his Jasig Keynote
4.2 Justin Erenkrantz From Apache Announced as a Keynote Speaker
4.3 Visit the Conference Blog

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Come to the most inclusive conference on open / community source higher education projects you will attend this year!
Jasig Spring 2010: "Ten Years of Open Source Innovation"

When: March 8 - 10, 2010
Supplementary Seminars March 7th and 10th
Developer Days, March 11 - 12
Where: Town and Country Resort, San Diego, California

Early Bird Registration and Hotel Discounts are available through January 31st

Register for both at the conference site: http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/10spring/index.html

Keynotes by:

Gregory A. Jackson, Vice President for Policy and Analysis at EDUCAUSE
Justin Erenkrantz, President of the Apache Software Foundation
Rod Johnson, Founder of the Spring Framework Project

See presentations and seminars on:

Bedework
CAS
Cyrus
DSpace
Fluid
HelpDesk
Internet2 Middleware
IT Ecosystem
Kuali Suite
Kuali Identity Management
Kuali Enterprise Workflow
Kuali OLE
OpenCast Matterhorn
OpenRegistry
OWASP
uPortal

Poster sessions and demos, Spring 3, Groovy, coding mobile apps, IdM architecture, designing for accessibility, and more!
Follow the Jasig Conference Blog: http://jasig.blogspot.com

See you in San Diego,
-Jasig 2010 Conference Planning Committee

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"Come together with over 2,000 open source and database enthusiasts from around the world to explore the power of MySQL and related technologies. The O'Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo happens April 12-15, 2010 in Santa Clara, California, at the Santa Clara Convention Center and Hyatt Regency Santa Clara."

Learn More: http://www.mysqlconf.com

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"The 11th Annual Sakai Conference will be taking place in beautiful Denver Colorado. The conference website with registration information is scheduled to be up and running in mid-February. In the meantime, here are some important dates so you can plan your calendar:

Main Conference Dates: Tuesday - Thursday, June 15-17, 2010
Pre-conference sessions: Monday, June 14, 2010
Project Coordination Meetings: TBD"

Source: http://sakaiproject.org/annual-conference

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"Learn. Network. Experience Open Source.

Boston. June 22-25, 2010

The Red Hat Summit and JBoss World are the premier open source events that bring together engineers, business decision makers, developers and community enthusiasts to learn about the latest in open source cloud, virtualization, platform, middleware, and management technologies.

Attendees will learn about open source advancements through: technical and business seminars, hands-on labs and demos, customer case studies, networking opportunities, partner displays, visionary keynotes, and direct collaboration with Red Hat engineers."

Source: http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2010/

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"OSCON brings together over 2,500 experts, visionaries, and hackers in the trenches to explore all that open source has to offer. OSCON is the premier gathering place to gain exposure to and evaluate the new projects, tools, services, platforms, languages, software, and standards sweeping through the open source community. Whether you want to make it faster, more effective, or more efficient, open source helps you make it happen for the long term."

Source: http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2010

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We've updated the CAS roadmap to reflect a more realistic target (essentially pulling a bunch of the stuff that was targeted for release 4 into 3.x releases to get the features to you sooner).

We'd be interested in feedback. A lot of the work for the 3.4 - 3.8 is already been done in the 4.x branch and needs to be moved into the 3.x branch. Some of the 3.4 work needed to be done anyway and is already in the trunk.

The roadmap can be found here: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=28574039

Scott Battaglia (Rutgers University), Lead Developer, Jasig Central Authentication Service

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The 10th Anniversary Jasig Conference in San Diego March 7-10 is full of uPortal-related offerings. There are half-day seminars on uPortal implementation, migration to uPortal 3, portlet development, uPortal for mobile devices, and using jQuery and Fluid Infusion. In addition, over a dozen sessions will cover portal-related topics including the following:

Developing with Spring Portlet MVC, Struts, jQuery, Fluid Infusion
WebServices and portlets
Content Management, Help Desk,
Managing uPortal environments
uPortal Roadmap
Portal planning

This is a great opportunity to advance your skills and see innovative techniques that others are using. There will be plenty of opportunities to spend face-to-face time with your peers from other universities and take back valuable information you can use in your own portal development.

And don't forget the three great keynote speakers:

"We Have Open Source. Now what?"
Gregory A. Jackson, Vice President for Policy and Analysis at Educause
"The Apache Software Foundation: No Jerks Allowed"
Justin Erenkrantz, President of the Apache Software Foundation
""Open Source, Cloud Computing and the Future of Innovation""
Rod Johnson, Founder of the Spring Framework Project

See the complete program at http://www.ja-sig.org/jasigconf/10spring/program.jsp?conf_id=jasig17

We hope to see you there!

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Jasig is proud to announce the second Release Candidate of uPortal 3.2.0. This release is feature complete and will be undergoing additional testing and bug fixes over the next week before the general audience release is cut. The uPortal 3.2 release includes many new features contributed back by uPortal adopters along with the updates from nearly a year of production use. At this time parties interested in new uPortal deployments are encouraged to strongly consider starting with uPortal 3.2.

New Features

UP-2047 - Create administrative portlet for managing channels
UP-2503 - Use mFSS to create a mobile theme
UP-2578 - Add Jasig Widget Portlets to uPortal
UP-2586 - Add config mode for SQL portlet

Improvements

UP-2564 - Refactor fluid css to use distributed files and overlays
UP-2579 - Support excluding portal events by username
UP-2581 - Add API to look up user ID by username
UP-2582 - Cache lookup of guest user id
UP-2583 - Add Spring App Context Shutdown Hooks
UP-2584 - Add EhCache regions for hibernate queries

This release is intended to be feature complete and API stable. That said, there is always the possibility that a bug fix in a RC could cause incompatibility with the GA release.

If you find an issue with this RC please report it in Jira. Issues in Jira are how we ensure the bugs are actually addressed.

Important Upgrading Note
uPortal 3.2.0 has had database changes that are incompatible with the previous releases. Upgrading to uPortal 3.2.0 will require using the crn-export scripts in your current install and then the crn-import scripts in your new uPortal 3.2.0 install. Pointing a uPortal 3.2.0 release at an older database will very likely not work and could cause database corruption.

Downloads are available from: http://www.jasig.org/uportal/download/uportal-320-RC2
Release notes are available at: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/UPC/3.2.0-RC2

uPortal Project Lead,
-Eric Dalquist

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The next uPortal Community Call is scheduled for February 18th, 1:00pm EST.

Once again, the call will be in the form of a webinar, which will be hosted by The Johns Hopkins University.

Agenda:

uPortal 3.2. Details of the 3.2 release, including uPortal's mobile theme, will be discussed
We will present features planned for the uPortal 3.3 release
In the first of a series of planned online demos, The Johns Hopkins Information Technology group will give us a walk-through of their enterprise portal
Questions and discussion will follow the presentation

Details for connecting to the webinar will follow in early February.

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We invite you to share your work with the uPortal community by volunteering to present a short online demo of your institution's portal.

Or, if you have developed a portlet that has been particularly useful on your campus, please offer to show that to us, as well.

Finally, we are looking for schools that are able to host future online webinars. If you think your facilities might accommodate us, please let us know!

Send your email to uportal-steering-committee at lists.jasig.org.

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A Release Candidate, RC1, of Bedework 3.6 is now available from the Bedework website: http://www.bedework.org/bedework/update.do?artcenterkey=2 <https://exchange.rpi.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.bedework.org/bedework/update.do?artcenterkey=2>

Highlights of RC1 which were not included in the 12/24/09 Preview release:

Quickstart:

Feed URL and Widget Builder for generating RSS, JSON, XML, and ical feeds as well as embeddable JavaScript widgets (based on work by Jeremy Bandini of Duke University)
A web cache application (also based on work by Jeremy Bandini) for storing and serving the feeds and widgets
A "feeder" application that serves as a common source for all data feeds and widgets

All public themes are modular and fully internationalized
New mobile theme for iPhones and other smartphones (based on work by William Gill of RPI)
Improvements to scheduling and subscription coloring in the user client

Packaging, documentation, and additional testing are all that remain before the production release of 3.6.

Features of Bedework 3.6 which appeared in the 12/24 Preview:

A new modularized default public theme based on Duke/Yale themes,which

Can be fully customized by changing a single settings file and modifying CSS
Supports the separation of "ongoing events" from the main event listings
Support for "featured events"

System notifications are now built on JMS (ApacheMQ), allowing moremodular design of the services:

Indexing reworked as outboard process
Scheduling reworked as outboard process
Logging of system notifications

Performance improvements for CalDAV, and for event retrieval
Improved ical subscriptions, user and public clients
Support for deleting collections
Bug fixes

Registration for the Jasig Spring Conference, 10 Years of Open Source Innovation, is now open. To register and learn more about the conference, which runs from March 8-10, 2010, see http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/10spring/index.html

On behalf of the Bedework development team,
Gary Schwartz

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The OpenRegistry Project is pleased to announce its next release, OpenRegistry 0.1-M4. This minor milestone starts to incorporate specifications for Systems of Records to determine which ones can use the system and what data they can provide. Future revisions to the specification will incorporate outbound data also.

This is the last milestone before the 0.1-RC1. 0.1 Final will be put into production by Rutgers in a limited fashion to gather real world feedback on the system. That feedback plus the additional use cases and code developed by SFU and Rutgers will yield the next major OR release, probably in the end of Q3 2010 or beginning of Q4 2010 (with various appropriate milestones or point releases in-between).

You can download the latest milestone from the Jasig Download Center: http://www.ja-sig.org/downloads/openregistry/

Documentation can be found here: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/ORUM/Home

These milestones should also be available in the Jasig Maven2 Repository.

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Greg Jackson has been a force in the Research & Education IT community for many years. From leadership positions at MIT, the University of Chicago, and now EDUCAUSE, he's been a pusher for policy and organizational changes needed to support R&E at all levels. And he has an uncanny knack for making people see what's important.

Until recently, the big stakes game for R&E IT was the network - ensuring that the network needs of R&E can be met and sustained by the R&E community. We now take for granted multi-gigabit end to end speeds between R&E locations anywhere in the world, but it took the formation of Internet2, National Lambda Rail, the Regional Optical Networks, Starlight, and many other organizations to change away from a course that would have left R&E dependent on the business models of the commercial network providers.

Now the stakes are high around IT services needed by R&E. Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, and other commercial providers are winning mindshare with their products and cloud services, but will their businesses suffer if they don't produce a good research library management system, integrate with our student information systems, or enable far-flung collaborators to parse corpuses of digitized text and particle collision products?

Against these Goliaths we pit our Davids: Jasig, Kuali, SAKAI, Internet2, Globus, and other organizations that produce open source software meeting needs peculiar to R&E. They are crucial, but are organizations like these, and their products, sustainable?

In his keynote, Greg will focus his ability to distill the important, and his considerable organizational experience, on the need to sustain our open source efforts. How should we deal with maintenance and updating of a successful open source product? Is the way we produced it to begin with also a good way to sustain it? Should commercial interests be harnessed somehow? Are all products sustained in the same way? What should open source producing organizations be and how should they do that?

You can find out more about Greg and his presentation on the Jasig Conference website.

Author: Tom Barton (University of Chicago)

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Each year, the Jasig Conference Planning Committee tries to outdo the previous year's committee with regards to obtaining top keynote speakers. This year is no different. We've already announced our stellar line-up of keynote speakers: Gregory A. Jackson from EDUCAUSE, Rod Johnson from SpringSource, and Justin Erenkrantz from the Apache Software Foundation. Over the coming months, we'll be using this blog to clue you in to why the Jasig conference is relevant to you. To kick this off, we're going to discuss our keynote speakers, in particular, in this entry, Justin Erenkrantz.

Justin's currently a software engineer for Joost, an Internet TV service. He also recently received his PhD from the University of California, Irvine, with a dissertation titled Architectural Dissonance and Harmony in REST-based Applications. In addition to that, he's currently serving as the president of the Apache Software Foundation. He's contributed to many projects that many of us use in our daily jobs including the Apache HTTP Server, Subversion, and APR.

The Apache Software Foundation recently celebrated its tenth anniversary, much like Jasig will be doing at the upcoming conference. The similarities don't end there though. Jasig has adopted the Apache 2.0 license as its license, and adopted much of Apache's concepts including meritocracy and incubation. The Apache Software Foundation's growth (including pains) and evolution provide an interesting glimpse into possible future directions for Jasig.

Justin's keynote will review the history and structure of Apache, discuss "The Apache Way", relevant business models often seen with Apache projects, and other aspects of the foundation.

Even if you're not actively involved in the guidance of Jasig, or any of its projects, the tale of Apache is sure to be of interest. You'd be hard-pressed to find a project that you've worked on that hasn't in some way utilized a project sponsored by Apache. You'll also gain valuable insight into how your favorite Jasig projects are run!

Find out more about Justin and the details on his presentation on the Jasig Conference web site.

Author: Scott Battaglia (Rutgers University)

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Visit the Conference blog at http://jasig.blogspot.com to get the latest news on Jasig 2010 (San Diego). Current posts include:

Jasig 2010 uPortal Highlights
Jasig 2010 Identity Management Track
Why Attend the Jasig 2010 Spring Conference

Here are some other pre-conference networking opportunities:

"Become a Fan" of Jasig on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jasig/158623771332?ref=ts

Visit the Jasig Spring 2010 Conference Facebook "Event" page at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=158260541286&ref=share

Follow Jasig on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jasig

See you in San Diego!

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Editor: Mark Rogers (University of Manitoba)

Past editions of the Jasig Newsletter can be found in the Jasig wiki at: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/Newsletter

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Newsletter - 201001 - January 2010

JASIG NEWSLETTER - JANUARY 2010

1 UPCOMING EVENTS

2 JASIG PROJECT UPDATES

3 JASIG INCUBATOR

4 FROM THE JASIG 2010 CONFERENCE BLOG

1 UPCOMING EVENTS

1.1 Jasig 2010 Early Registration Ends Jan 31!

1.2 MySQL Conference and Expo - Santa Clara, California (April 12-15, 2010)

1.3 11th Sakai Conference - Denver, Colorado, USA (June 2010)

1.4 The 2010 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World - Boston, Massachusetts (June 22-25, 2010)

1.5 OSCON 2010 Open Source Convention - Portland, Oregon (July 19-23, 2010)

2 JASIG PROJECT UPDATES

2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)

2.1.1 CAS Roadmap Updated

2.2 uPortal

2.2.1 uPortal Opportunities at the Spring Conference

2.2.2 uPortal 3.2.0-RC2 Released

2.2.3 February uPortal Community Call

2.2.4 Future uPortal Community Calls

3 JASIG INCUBATOR

3.1 Bedework 3.6 RC1 now available for download

3.2 OpenRegistry 0.1-M4 Release

4 FROM THE JASIG 2010 CONFERENCE BLOG

4.1 Greg Jackson Will Speak on Sustaining Open Source in his Jasig Keynote

4.2 Justin Erenkrantz From Apache Announced as a Keynote Speaker

4.3 Visit the Conference Blog

Jasig Newsletter - January 2010