Newsletter - 200705 - May 2007

1. Message from the Editor

Hi everyone. In our third newsletter, we have updates from CAS and uPortal on progress towards new releases which are expected to be available by the Summer JA-SIG Conference.

In addition, I have to announce that this issue will likely be the last one I personally publish. As some people know I have accepted a transfer within Rutgers to our Sakai implementation team, though I will likely continue to be involved with JA-SIG in various ways, and hope to see everyone at the Summer conference.

Mark Rogers from the University of Manitoba has graciously agreed to take on responsibility for publishing future editions – look forward to hearing more from him next (this) month.

If your institution or company has items of interest to the JA-SIG membership, please submit them via email to newsletter@ja-sig.org for consideration in the next issue. Please include a subject line containing: NEWSLETTER-CONTRIBUTION with any contributions.

Jason Shao
Editor, JA-SIG Newsletter

2. Call for Volunteers: Writing Skills Needed

From time to time we ask folks to volunteer for a support role that fills a specific need within our community. Today we are seeking people with writing skills to volunteer for the role of uPortal Documentation Coordinator. This person will help undertake a new initiative to improve uPortal documentation on the web by aggregating, organizing, editing, and adding to the host of information that is spread throughout our wiki and mail lists. The goal would be to create excellent documentation for new portal users and to provide a helpful reference for all.

Responsibilities include:

• Point of contact for collaboration on documentation, brokering worthwhile documentation initiatives
• Cheerleader for documentation, encouraging participants to document and guiding towards productive and useful documentation approaches
• Contributes to and organizes portions of uPortal documentation
• Editor in Chief of uPortal portions of the JA-SIG wiki, with particular responsibility for encouraging good organization and usability alongside inclusiveness
• Reports regularly to the uPortal Framework Coordinator on the state of documentation efforts

3. Community Member Profile: Eric Dalquist (uP3 Lead)

Eric Dalquist
Portal Services Specialist
University of Madison - Wisconsin, Department of IT

I am the lead Java developer on the My-UW portal project responsible for portal framework and core portlet design and development. I work with portal application developers providing support on design and development issues.

I also serve as the lead developer for the JA-SIG uPortal 3 project. As lead developer I manage the progress of the project through task scheduling, design development and release management as well as being involved in actually coding much of the framework.

I have a Bachelors of Sciences in Computer Science from Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan and enjoy playing soccer and running with my wife Gretchen in and around Madison.

Work Phone: 608-890-1423

4. CAS Project Updates

CAS Server 3.1 M2 Released

Milestone 2 includes numerous enhancements:

• BerkeleyDb-backed TicketRegistry
• German Internationalization Support
• NTLM Support
• Registered Services Administration Application
• Re-vamped Registered Services/Whitelist Support
• Java 5 Required

Check out the complete changelog at: http://www.ja-sig.org/issues/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10007&styleName=Html&version=10381

You can download the current releases at:

• http://www.ja-sig.org/downloads/cas/cas-server-3.1-m2-release.zip
• http://www.ja-sig.org/downloads/cas/cas-server-3.1-m2-release.tar.gz

Scott Battaglia - Lead Developer, JA-SIG Central Authentication Service
Rutgers University

Ruby CAS Server

The Ruby community is proud to announce RubyCAS-Server, a stand-alone server implementing the CAS 2.0 protocol.

RubyCAS-Server can be used as a full-featured alternative to the JA-SIG CAS server. Since it runs as a stand-alone daemon or as a simple CGI script, no existing Java infrastructure is required. The server is designed to be easily configurable, with support for custom front-end themes and back-end authenticators. Authenticators for Active Directory, LDAP, and SQL are included in the package.

To learn more, visit http://code.google.com/p/rubycas-server/

RubyCAS-Server is written in Ruby using the Camping micro-framework. The project is currently in beta and is under active development.

Matt Zukowski
mzukowski@urbacon.net

5. HyperContent

No news to report.

6. uPortal

uPortal 2.x

The uPortal 2.6 release proceeds apace, with a 2.6.0 milestone 1 (with quickstart courtesy of Vincent Mathieu) available from the uPortal downloads page. uPortal 2.6 ships with drag and drop user preferences available for default theme. Jen Bourey of Yale University took point on making this happen and continues to merge in improvements derived from user experience testing. DLM (Distributed Layout Management, donated by SunGard Higher Education) is the default layout management approach. Mark Boyd was generous with his time and expertise in making this happen. uPortal 2.6 ships with a modern and beautiful default DLM-compatible structure transform / theme transform / skin derived from that of the highly successful MyRutgers uPortal project. Jason Shao was key to this effort. Tim Carroll has contributed a patch solving the infamous UP-1040 issue with JSR-168 portlet preferences in uPortal, with Eric Dalquist merging this into the shared codebase. Brad's Johnson's CSynFeedReader offers a new approach to including RSS and other syndicated feeds in uPortal. uPortal 2.6 standardizes on JDK 1.5 and support for JDK 1.6, moving uPortal to a more performant, more featureful development and runtime environment. Cris Holdorph took initiative in smoothing JDK 1.6 compatibility wrinkles. uPortal 2.6 includes many other enhancements, some of which derived from Unicon's Academus product and merged in by Unicon, with Nick Bolton doing most of the heavy lifting.

The uPortal developer meeting at Johns Hopkins University included discussion of uPortal 2.6 progress, recent contributions by Unicon to related open source, drag and drop in uPortal 2.6, out-of-the-box uPortal CAS integration and potential uPortal 2.7 vision, and facilities for the export and import of uPortal data, with approximately seventeen remote and in-person participants. Minutes from this meeting should soon be available from project secretary Michael Oltz.

Jason Shao prototyped a uPortal manual wiki space that grew during the developer meeting. The uPortal project seeks a uPortal Documentation Coordinator to help shepherd this and other documentation efforts.

Andrew Petro
Unicon, Inc.
uP 2.6 Release Engineer

uPortal 3.0

The recent uPortal developers meeting provided for valuable discussion and direction on the uPortal 3 project. Discussion around XML import/export functionality for configuration, simplification of deployment processes and expanding the Maven based build process. These discussions provide excelent guidance for the project and put it on track for a RC2 release before the summer JA-SIG conference in Denver.

Eric Dalquist
University of Wisconsin
uP3 Release Engineer

San Joaquin Delta College Work Contributed to Community

Unicon, Inc. announced that the uPortal development work done for San Joaquin Delta College (SJDC) has been contributed by the college back to the uPortal community. Unicon's recently-completed work began as a project in the fall of 2006 to develop and implement new features to the SJDC campus portal which included an Email Preview Portlet and a News and Alert Channels. The new features are designed to benefit students, faculty, and administrative staff members of the online campus by providing them with a highly-accessible, personalized view of updated and relevant information after they login to the Web site. The act of contributing newly-developed features and source code to a community is consistent with the philosophy of open source software.

• The new EPP provides an interface where users can see a predetermined number of unread messages in their inbox in a small window within the portal. When the user clicks on the email in the preview window, a new browser window is launched and the user's mail inbox is presented. The EPP is a JSR 168 compliant portlet and can be configured to work with any IMAP server.
• The updated News and Alerts channels allow for two different types of announcements to be authored. Unicon modified the previous USC channels to allow for different property files to split the Alerts functionality into one channel and the News functionality into another. The two instances of the channel also utilize different style sheets, which allows for custom styling appropriate for the announcement type.

More information is available at: http://www.unicon.net/press_room_1181.html

Unicon, Inc.

7. JA-SIG Summer Conference

Join Phil Windley, Matt Raible, and Matt Asay at the JA-SIG Summer 2007 conference! Don't miss the opportunities of this conference to

• get in depth knowledge from seminars
• see demonstrations and presentations from your higher ed colleagues
• work with other attendees on your common problems
• help advance the JA-SIG projects at the Wednesday BarCamp http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/gQIs

Susan Bramhall
JA-SIG Summer 2007 Conference Committee Chair