Newsletter - 200711 - November 2007

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1 Welcome
1.1 Editor's Message

2 JA-SIG Project Updates
2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)
2.1.1 CAS Clients
2.1.2 CAS Server
2.1.3 Recent CAS Deployments
2.2 uPortal
2.3 Hypercontent

3 Community News and Events
3.1 First JA-SIG Unconference
3.2 JA-SIG Spring 2008 Conference Update (April 27-30, 2008)

4 Other Events and Activities
4.1 8th Sakai Conference (December 4-7, 2007)
4.2 EclipseCon 2008 (March 17-20, 2008)
4.3 2008 JavaOne Conference (May 6-9, 2008)
4.4 EDUCAUSE 2008 (October 28-31, 2008)

5 EDUCAUSE Online

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Welcome to the November 2007 issue of the JA-SIG Newsletter.

Even with all the activity surrounding the Unconference, the lead developers were still able to provide updates on their projects. Amazing!

You will also enjoy an insightful commentary on the Unconference by JA-SIG Board Chair, Jonathan Markow, as an introduction of sorts to his new JA-SIG blog, along with an update on the Spring 2008 Conference, to be held in St. Paul, Minnesota this coming April.

To round out this month's content, we have included a link to the Catalyst Award video shown at EDUCAUSE 2007, which I thought was very nicely done. It is well worth watching.

As always, feel free to send your comments or content to newsletter at jasig dot org.

Enjoy!
Mark Mark (University of Manitoba), Editor, JA-SIG Newsletter

Paul Hunniset from the University of the West of England, Bristol has been working on a new JA-SIG CAS Client for .NET. Its been designed to be a generic replacement for the previous ASP.NET client and includes both browser support and an underlying API.

The .Net CAS Client docs have been updated to document the new browser based authentication. This client can now fully replace the existing ASP.Net ones, although there are some improvements beyond that, which Paul is hoping to do.

Phillip Ames from the University of Connecticut has been hard at work on more updates to the mod_auth_cas project, which seems to be gaining steam. The current version is now 1.0.3 with more updates to follow including increased stability and support for custom headers that include the username to be passed to applications (to allow for integration with applications that support other SSO protocols).

Scott Battaglia has been working on updating the JA-SIG CAS Client for Java to provide an easier configuration mechanism for those not wishing to utilize the Spring Framework (while still offering the capability for those who wish to do so). Eric Pugh of OpenSource Connections is also working on the CAS Client for Java to include support for Tomcat and JBoss.

CAS 3.1.1 was recently released and the team is now hard at work on the CAS 3.1.2 release. This release will include minor bug fixes and enhancements, upgrades to current libraries, and improve the management of the XML configuration files.

The CAS team is also working on integrating InfoCards/CardSpace with CAS, as well as a Services Registration application.

Please welcome the following universities as recent CAS deployers:

Bob Jones University
University of Duisburg-Essen
University of California, Berkeley
Darmstadt University of Technology

Contributed by:
ScottS (Rutgers University), Lead Developer, JA-SIG Central Authentication Service

Many uPortal developers and deployers gathered in scenic New Brunswick for the Rutgers-hosted JA-SIG UnConference. Fun, comradery, user experience design, and working code were enjoyed by many. Andrew Petro especially appreciated becoming more aware of Fluid resources in support of uPortal development and the positively influential role Fluid is playing in current uPortal efforts. While some Fluid developers and designers came to the conference already well acquainted with uPortal, for others the UnConference served as an intense introduction to JA-SIG culture. Others were particularly excited about the prospect of sharing more portlets via project incubation and improved Clearinghouse-like listings discussed at this event, Drew Wills' import-export tooling further demonstrated and shared, and the production deployment of the UW-Madison Web Proxy Portlet into additional portals beyond Wisconsin.

In the post-conference collaboration and discussion, Jen Bourey of Yale University coded a prototype of a user feedback reporting and analysis system inspired by that in Collier Jones' impressive myUMBC (see also demo). uPortal developers worked with portal developers from several institutions to gather requirements around notifications, linking, and session management.

While Eric Dalquist has done a great deal of work to prepare uPortal 2.6.1 through a series of pre-GA releases, he has handed off to Andrew Petro the task of finalizing and posting a uPortal 2.6.1 GA, which is expected to arrive in the latter part of the week of November 19th.

Progress on the newly defined uPortal 3 continues rapidly. Susan Bramhall and Dan Ellentuck updated uPortal 3 to use the stand-alone Person Directory API and are continuing to do the same for the Groups and Permissions APIs. Pluto 1.1 integration is the only required remaining feature before a release candidate and good progress is being made. Of course, uPortal 3 will be even better if it can contain any of a number of available optional features, which will be more or less included depending on involvement of additional developers. It is never too late to jump in on uportal-dev@lists.ja-sig.org and get involved with development.

Contributors:
Andrew Petro (Unicon, Inc.), uPortal Release Engineer
Eric Dalquist (University of Wisconsin - Madison), uPortal Release Engineer

HyperContent update:
New features added to CVS include dependency recognition for both XSLT document() calls and Velocity resource-loader calls. Eight jakarta commons utility classes were added to the basic Velocity template context, adding much useful functionality. See the HyperContent mailing list archives for more details on the types of use cases these features enable!

Contributed by: Alex Vigdor, Hypercontent Architect & Lead Developer

I've begun a new blog on all things JA-SIG. For now, it's located at jjmarkow.wordpress.com. By way of introducing it, I've extracted a post about our recent unconference. The unconference format was a terrific match for what we do best--sharing and collaboration among developers. I hope it will be the first of many. Here's the blog entry:

"I'm just back from our first JA-SIG Unconference, and I must say I couldn't be happier with the way it turned out. For those unfamiliar with the unconference format, it's a self-organizing event — no prepared agenda or presentations — that becomes the creation of its attendees.

We seeded the content with several weeks of discussion by phone, email, and wiki, and we bounded each of the two days with some organized activities for the sixty or so attendees who arrived at the Rutgers University conference center. After a session of introductions and "lightening" talks — brief, volunteer discourses on just about anything of interest — we spontaneously filled a whiteboard with a schedule of sessions that spread out over several conference rooms throughout the day. We re-grouped at the end of the day to process how things went and talk about plans for the following day.

A few things impressed me the most. One, as I told the group today, the degree of creativity, intelligence, generosity, and collaboration was amazingly high. I'm used to seeing that at JA-SIG events. Still, it amazes me to think about sixty people, a third of whom had never even been exposed to our community, creating this experience for themselves, organizing it together in the best possible way, asking and answering important questions, planning future work together, learning and sharing, designing code, and just enjoying each other's company-all over the course of 48 hours.

I was also particularly impressed by the motivation and rigor with which our gang made really productive strides towards beginning important new initiatives that had been on the back burner for a long time in the areas of licensing, portlet sharing, LMS/portal integration, and project incubation, to name a few. We left the unconference with a list of follow-up activities and go-to people assigned to them. (A number of them have stayed a few days longer to get some real stuff done.)

I'll say more about the unconference in upcoming posts, but, in summary, I think I speak for most of us by saying that I'm really looking forward to the next one."

Jonathan Markow
JA-SIG Board Chair and Acting Executive Director

The JA-SIG Spring 2008 Conference will be held Sunday, April 27th through Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 in St. Paul, Minnesota, so mark your calendars!

This conference is shaping up to be an exciting gathering given the engagement of many community source projects, foundations, and collaborative organizations. We are very grateful for the time of those who are acting as the liaisons to these external organizations and are participating as members on the committee. So far we have representatives from the following projects - DSpace, Fedora, FLUID, Internet2, Kuali, and Sakai.

I'd also like to introduce everyone to the program chair - Patrick Berry from CSU Chico. Pat will be working to coordinate the first committee meeting over the next couple of weeks, so there is still time to sign up if you want to volunteer to help out. Welcome Pat and thank you for taking on this very important leadership role!

Current program committee members are:

Patrick Berry, CSU Chico, Program Chair
Jonathan Markow, JA-SIG Executive Director, Community Source Liaison
Aaron Godert, Cornell University, JA-SIG Board Liaison to Committee
Jim Helwig, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Member
Paul Zablosky, University of British Columbia, Wiki Master/FLUID Liaison
John Fereira, Cornell University, Conference Web Site Master
Susan Inouye, University of Hawaii, Member
Phil McKown, Indiana University, Kuali Liaison
Michele Kimpton, DSpace, DSpace Liaison
Bob Morgan, University of Washington, Internet2 IdM Liaison
Jenn Troxel Cummings, Concentra, Member
Debbie Smith, Concentra, Member
Daniel Davis, Cornell University, Fedora Commons Liaison
Sakai Liaison - TBD

Stay tuned for more details!

Contributed by: Aaron Godert

"The Sakai Foundation is pleased to announce that the December 2007 Sakai Community Conference will be held in Newport Beach, California, USA. The dates will be Tuesday-Thursday, December 4-7, with pre- and post-conference sessions and activities on Monday the 3rd, and Friday, the 7th. The site will be the Newport Beach Marriott for the Tuesday-Thursday meetings." (from the sakaiproject.org web site)

For further information, go to https://sakai.educonference.com/conference/index.php

Place: Santa Clara, California

"EclipseCon is the premier technical and user conference focusing on the power of the Eclipse platform. From implementers to users, and everyone in between, if you are using, building, or considering Eclipse, EclipseCon is the conference you need to attend."

Source: EclipseCon 2008 Web Site - http://www.eclipsecon.org/2008/

Place: The Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA

"Attracting over 15,000 developers and leaders in the developer community - from industry leaders, to experienced developers to developers starting out - this conference is one that brings together some of the industry's best and brightest.

The JavaOne conference is your opportunity to reach this specialized community by educating and sharing your experience and expertise with the developer community."

Source: 2008 JavaOne Conference Web Site - http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf/index.jsp

"Mark your calendar for the premier information technology event in higher education‚ EDUCAUSE 2008, October 28-31 in Orlando, Florida. The program 'Interaction, Ideas, Inspiration' will include preconference seminars; track and poster sessions; small group meetings; and corporate exhibits, presentations, and workshops. ... "

Source: EDUCAUSE 2008 Web Site - http://www.educause.edu/e08

We had reported earlier in the year on the EDUCAUSE Catalyst Award given to the uPortal Project. Here is an excellent video presentation celebrating this truly outstanding achievement.

You might also wish to check out some other great content from EDUCAUSE in the form of podcasts. If you are interested in wikis, listen to the related John Hopkins University presentation.

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JA-SIG Newsletter - November 2007

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

If your institution or company has items of interest to the JA-SIG membership, please submit them via email to newsletter@ja-sig.org.

The next JA-SIG Newsletter will be published on or about December 15th, 2007. Articles for that edition of the newsletter should be submitted no later than Friday, December 14th, 2007.

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JA-SIG Newsletter - November 2007

1 Welcome

1.1 Editor's Message

2 Project Updates

2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)

2.1.1 CAS Clients

2.1.2 CAS Server

2.1.3 Recent CAS Deployments

2.2 uPortal

2.3 Hypercontent

3 Community News and Events

3.1 First JA-SIG Unconference

3.2 JA-SIG Spring 2008 Conference Update (April 27-30, 2008)

4 Other Events and Activities

4.1 8th Sakai Conference (December 4-7, 2007)

4.2 EclipseCon 2008 (March 17-20, 2008)

4.3 2008 JavaOne Conference (May 6-9, 2008)

4.4 EDUCAUSE 2008 (October 28-31, 2008)

5 EDUCAUSE Online