Newsletter - 200612 - December 2006

1. Welcome from the JA-SIG Board

Welcome to this introductory issue of the JA-SIG Newsletter. Our aim is to keep you up to date on developments in the JA-SIG community. We will provide news about our projects and let you know about events of interest. Actually, we hope to be hearing a lot from you in months to come. We welcome your articles and announcements.

This issue is being distributed widely to let everyone know about us--apologies if you have received cross-postings. Future issues will be sent only to subscribers of the email list, JASIG-ANNOUNCE (to join, go to http://tinyurl.com/y6otmz ).

The editor of our newsletter is Jason Shao, an application developer at Rutgers University and development process coordinator for the uPortal project. Jason will be soliciting content from you for future newsletters. I'd like to extend thanks to him and to the contributors to this first issue. Enjoy.

Jonathan Markow
JA-SIG Board Chair

2. Welcome from the Editor

Welcome from the Editor: Introductions, schedule, contents and how to submit

Hi everyone. I've been involved for several years in the JA-SIG uPortal community, and am pleased to be able to help share some of the various activities and news from many quarters. This newsletter is expected to be published monthly, towards the middle of the month and is intended to communicate information of interest to JA-SIG members including: JA-SIG news, project updates, and upcoming events. If anyone has items which they feel would be of interest to the JA-SIG membership, they may email them to jayshao@rutgers.edu for consideration for the next issue. Please include a subject line containing: NEWSLETTER-CONTRIBUTION with any contributions.

Jason Shao
Editor, JA-SIG Newsletter

3. JA-SIG Membership

At the recent semi-annual JA-SIG conference in Atlanta, the board introduced a new membership program. For the first time in our seven-year history (and our first year as a non-profit, 501(c)3 corporation), institutions and commercial affiliates will be invited to join the organization as Members. We expect the program to strengthen JA-SIG in two significant ways. First, membership fees will help ensure sustainability and growth of the work we do. Secondly, organizations that join will be provided with avenues to participate in the strategic direction and operations of JA-SIG initiatives in a more formal way.

We will keep you informed of the progress of the membership program in future newsletters. If you have questions, please feel free to email us at membership@ja-sig.org.

We would like to thank the following organizations for their early commitment to joining the program:

Institutional Members:
Cornell University, Dalhousie University, Duke University, Indiana University, Princeton University, Queens University, Rutgers University, Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia, University of Hull, University of Winnipeg, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Delaware, University of Michigan, University of Valenciennes, University of Rennes, University of California, Irvine, University of Guelph, University of Manitoba, Virginia Tech, York University

Commercial Affiliates:
Unicon

Jonathan Markow
JA-SIG Board Chair

4. JA-SIG 2006 Winter Conference (Atlanta, GA)

The most-often heard complaint at the JA-SIG Winter Conference in Atlanta this December was that there was too much choice – too many good topics to choose from in too few time slots. With three presentation tracks and a BOF/Seminar track, the two days of the conference went by too fast for many, with not enough time for face-to-face meetings, discussions, debates, and just catching-up with colleagues. The presentation materials for all the track sessions are being collected in the wiki, arranged according to the program schedule for easy identification.

Memorable highlights include:

• The uPortal 3 Roadmap: & announcement of Release Candidate 1
• New governance plans and membership structure: 21 institutions having already signed up at the time of the conference.
• User Experience and User Interface issues: Strong interest in user experience issues, including a visit by the very ambitious FLUID Project, which plans to build rich technical solutions to user-interface and accessibility challenges across projects/technologies.
• Partnerships with other community source efforts: Sakai, Kuali Rice, and Kuali Student were all well represented at the conference.
• AJAX: The program included a pair of sessions on AJAX, which turned out to be a popular choice for many attendees.
• Commercial Support: Unicon has announced the availability of support contracts for JA-SIG open-source products.

In addition to the usual crowd of dedicated JA-SIG members, there was a gratifyingly-large number of first-time participants at the conference. Overall the mood of the conference was one of energy, enthusiasm, optimism, and commitment; promising great new advances in the coming year. For those who attended, what did you think of the conference? What was the high point for you? Why not share your impressions with your colleagues at the JA-SIG Conference Planning wiki space? There's a good chance that the program committee will read your comments and use your ideas in planning next conference, scheduled for June 2007 in Denver.

Paul Zablosky
JA-SIG 2006 Winter Conference Committee Chair

5. uPortal: 3.0-RC1, 2.6 Release Engineer

uPortal 3.0.0-RC1 was released on the 27th of November. This release is a significant step for the uPortal 3 project. The portal framework is near functional completeness. This functionality includes simple layout managment, full groups and permissions support, functional layout management with Drag and Drop support, bookmarkable tabs and a large number of internal bug and feature enhancements. There are also a core set of functional portlets included in the release which provide Web Proxying, XSLT, InlineFrame and Bookmarks along with a uPortal 2 IChannel adapter. The RC1 is ready for people to download and work with in a testing and pilot environment. Short term plans are focused on working with people piloting the framework to address bugs found in the RC. Medium term plans include a refactoring effort to use Maven 2, migration to Pluto 1.1 and import/export utilities for initial data population. Longer term plans include porting DLM to uPortal 3. There is a RC2 release planned for mid-January 2007 which will mainly focus on bug fixes from the previous month of work with pilot institutions.

Eric Dalquist
uPortal 3 Release Engineer

Additionally: Jan Nielson from Sunguard HE has accepted the role of Release Engineer for the work towards uPortal 2.6 upon completion of his commitment for Sungard's Luminus IV platform. uPortal 2.6 represents the collection of various work currently undergoing in the HEAD of the uportal 2.x CVS tree. It is expected to include features like JMX metrics, XHMTL/CSS skins, DLM as the default layout manager, and a number of stability and performance improvements. Andrew Petro has also continued to organize the maintenance of the uPortal 2.5.x branch, releasing a 2.5.3 release, and beginning the process of producing a 2.5.4 release to include various fixes and patches contributed from the community.

– Jason

6. Hypercontent 2.1-RC1

The Java Architectures Special Interest Group (JA-SIG) is proud to announce a release candidate for version 2.1 of HyperContent, a web and portlet content management system that scales from workgroups to the enterprise. This release candidate is available in a pre-integrated bundle with uPortal 2.5.3 and CAS 3.0.5, forming a trio of JA-SIG products that delivers an out-of-the-box solution for enterprise portal, content management and single sign-on. HyperContent 2.1 takes a new role in this architecture via its new JSR-168 portlet, offering direct presentation and in-place editing of portlet content.

HyperContent 2.1 offers a raft of new features on top of the robust web content management and publishing architecture introduced a year ago in version 2.0, including search based collections, file browsing for links and images, portlet editing and publishing, blog support, and much more! The new release also contains a starter project that gives you a solid base from which to build web sites of any size and structure using best practices. A documentation effort is currently underway to make it easier than ever to get up and running with HyperContent.

Download the release at: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/hypercontent/uPortal_HyperContent_CAS.zip

Alex Vigdor
Hypercontent Architect & Lead Developer

7. CAS: Server 3.0.6, JA-SIG CAS Client 3.0.0

2006 was a year in which JA-SIG CAS saw many new features and enhancements. The most recent release, JA-SIG CAS 3.0.6 includes better support for clustering CAS servers, performance improvements, and library upgrades. Previous recent releases include new features such as authentication handlers for JAAS, LDAP, and X.509 Certificates, HttpClient support, and more internationalization (eight languages).

The upcoming 3.1 release is looking to support standards such as SAML as well as provide more administrative features and service restriction options as well as migration to Maven 2.

Recently, the JA-SIG CAS Client for Java was released. This release is a major refactoring of the Yale CAS Client and includes a more plugable architecture and flexible configuration options. It includes support for the CAS 1 and CAS 2 protocol. Future releases of the CAS client will include support for SAML. Plans are underway to upgrade Acegi Security for Spring to the latest CAS client.

Scott Battaglia
CAS Server 3.0 Lead Developer