Newsletter - 200702 - February 2007

1. Message from the Editor

Hi everyone. In our third monthly newsletter, we have updates from our compatriots across the pond, as well as news on JA-SIG projects, infrastructure, and conferences. CAS and uPortal both have major news to report related to upcoming releases.

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

Jason Shao
Editor, JA-SIG Newsletter

2. ESUP-Days #3: Third ESUP-Portail Conference Draws 150 Participants in Paris

One hundred and fifty participants recently attended the "ESUP-Days" conference in Paris (Jan. 26, 2007) organized by the ESUP-Portail consortium (http://www.esup-portail.org).

The outstanding moments of the day were the presentations of:

• The project incubator of the consortium. Initiated last September, it allows developers to present their projects and make them available to the whole community. Provided that it concerns the Higher Education community, any project is welcome, without giving the warranties of the official ESUP-Portail repository.
• The new esup-commons development framework, based on Spring, JSF and Hibernate/Ibatis. Esup-commons allows developers to develop applications that can be deployed either as portlets or servlets - sharing exactly the same code - and offers many other interesting features to developers. All new development projects of the consortium are encouraged to use this framework, and several trainings are organized in France to encourage wide-spread use of these new technologies.
• Showcases of the integration of e-learning platforms (Dokeos, Moodle...) into the ESUP-Portail environment.
• User-experience feedback, always an important point of these events.

In addition, this conference, with representatives of the entire ESUP-Portail community (76 institutions), was an opportunity to describe the new organization of JA-SIG and its membership program, and also to give information on uPortal v3, the next generation of the open source enterprise portal.

Pascal Aubry
Université de Rennes 1

3. Introducing the "jasig-discuss@lists.ja-sig.org" Mailing List

A new "jasig-discuss@lists.ja-sig.org" mailing list has been created to support the discussion of open source and community source software development in administration of higher education, pursuant to the stated "special interest" of the JA-SIG, outside the context of any particular JA-SIG project. Those individuals who have general ideas about JA-SIG or are just interested in discussions pertinent to community should feel free to subscribe to this list via the web at https://lists.wisc.edu/read/all_forums/subscribe?name=jasig-discuss or by sending a blank email to join-jasig-discuss@lists.wisc.edu.

Archives for this list are available here https://lists.wisc.edu/read/?forum=jasig-discuss and as always, basic information about all JA-SIG related lists is located here http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/40k.

Aaron Godert
Cornell University

4. JA-SIG Server and Clearinghouse Update

The JA-SIG Server and Clearinghouse team continued its clean-up efforts. The team started to focus in on mailing list consolidation this month and has begun to migrate the lists to the new "lists.ja-sig.org" domain name which will be physically managed by a Lyris list system graciously hosted by the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Current members of the various JA-SIG related lists should have received a communication about this work a few weeks ago, which explained the effort in more detail. You can find specific information about the on-going work here http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/5Uk. When the consolidation has been completed, a full summary of all available lists will be located here http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/40k.

In addition, the team started a dialog on ideas for the next generation Clearinghouse as a way for improving the suite of tools that are used for the collaborative efforts that are inherent to JA-SIG. An email was sent to all JA-SIG mailing lists asking for interested individuals to provide feedback about the current services that are being made available to the the JA-SIG community. All ideas and suggestions are being summarized here http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/SIIX, so please feel free to add your thoughts.

Lastly, the JA-SIG Server and Clearinghouse team is made up of volunteers from the community who work to ensure that the services we provide are reliable and of the utmost quality. As JA-SIG continues to grow the demand on this team increases as well. If you are interested in volunteering some of your time as a member of this team, please send an email to ag266@cornell.edu.

Aaron Godert
Cornell University

5. Sun Microsystems Awards Grant to Support New JA-SIG Server Infrastructure

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW), the creator of Java technology and Solaris, recently awarded an Academic Excellence Grant to Princeton University for the support of JA-SIG, the global, non-profit organization focusing on the sharing of open technology in higher education. The grant will be used to replace the aging hardware/software infrastructure supporting JA-SIG's applications, databases, and utilities. Princeton, a JA-SIG member, provides a host site and manages system administration responsibilities for the organization.

The Sun grant will include a Sun Fire T2000 Server with 4 core 1.0GHz UltraSPARC T1 processor, and Solaris 10 and Java Enterprise System software pre-installed. The grant from Sun is timely in that it allows JA-SIG to move to a robust, higher capacity technology platform while we grow as an organization.

Jonathan Markow
JA-SIG Board Chair

6. JA-SIG Summer 2007 Conference (Denver)

Planning for the summer JA-SIG conference is well underway. JA-SIG with Altitude will take place at the The Renaissance Denver Hotel in Denver Colorado Sunday June 24 through Wednesday June 27, 2007. The program will include seminars on CAS, Ajax, Kuali, uPortal DLM, Sakai, Spring PortletMVC and more. The goal of the conference is to facilitate the sharing of plans, problems, solutions and ideas and the committee welcomes presentations from all participants. The best way to enjoy it is to become one of the presenters. The deadline for proposals for regular sessions is Wed March 7. Suggested topics and additional information can be found on the conference web site at http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/07summer/. Please join us! Registration will be open by the end of February.

Susan Bramhall
Yale University

7. CAS Server and Client Updates

First, welcome to Marvin Addison, the newest CAS client committer. Marvin will be focusing on bringing Virginia Tech's .NET CAS Client under the JA-SIG umbrella. Welcome, Marvin!

Progress marches on for the CAS Server. CAS Server 3.0.7 should be released shortly (it's currently in RC). Work progresses towards the CAS Server 3.1 M2 release. Deployers have already started testing the 3.1 M1 release and providing valuable feedback.

With the upcoming JA-SIG Conference, the CAS project is looking to increase the number of presentations available to CAS deployers. A comprehensive CAS pre-conference seminar is already scheduled, with other CAS content to be announced soon. If you are doing something interesting with CAS or Identity Management, we encourage you to submit a proposal. If you'd like to discuss your proposal first, please feel free to contact me <scott.battaglia@gmail.com>.

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

8. HyperContent

No news to report.

9. uPortal

uPortal 2.x

Efforts in uPortal 2 CVS "HEAD" are focused towards a near-term uPortal 2.6 release. This release is expected to be feature-complete and producing release candidates for quality assurance in early March. Yale University is poised to contribute exciting drag-and-drop user layout preferences features built on the popular Dojo ajax framework, targeted for inclusion in this release. This enhancement is the debut contribution of recently added committer, Jen Bourey. Paul Gazda, also recently added as a project committer, is to be thanked for addressing several groups management issues this week. Nick Nick (Deactivated) and Andrew Petro continue to merge Unicon's Academus uPortal enhancements into the codebase. Daniel McCallum, also of Unicon, has posted a proof-of-concept result of migrating uPortal CVS to SVN for community review. The prospect of this conversion was met with developer support and so it is likely this conversion will be completed soon, ideally in time for uPortal 2.6. Meanwhile, the uPortal users' mailing list has seen a surge in discussion and community mutual support in making use of the uPortal platform and Bart Grebowiec, a user experience designer at Rutgers, has been granted project committership to further project focus on user experience. Available uPortal developers are encouraged to gather in person (or via remote technologies) for the April 2007 developers' meeting.

Other big news in the 2.6 moveup is the addition of a jsp channel type. The documentation for the channel should be in the wiki shortly. For 2.7 the UI Fragment manager, subscribed fragments, and complete I18N support for baseline are the big items. It is pretty cool to change the locale and see the whole portal morph into the different language provided the channels viewed also support it.

Andrew Petro
Unicon

Mark Boyd
Sunguard HE

uPortal 3.0

Peter and I spent a weekend in VA with David DeWolf from the Pluto project, Eliot Metsger from JHU and Chuck Severance working on upgrading uP3 to pluto 1.1 That work is nearing completion and has resulting in a significant simplification of the uP3 codebase (removed nearly 20K lines of code). In parallel with this effort Elliot is working on re-organizing the uP3 project to a nice maven2 multi-project configuration. The goal is to complete both pieces of work for the spring developers meeting. At the developers meeting we will be discussing data file formats and a few other issues that will result in us being able to get rid of DBLoader and have an easier to setup and install portal.

Eric Dalquist
University of Wisconsin

10. Conference CFP

Join Phil Windley in presenting at the JA-SIG Summer 2007 conference!

A Call For Proposals is now open! Please submit your proposals for conference sessions and pre/post conference seminars. The submission deadline for pre-conference proposals is February 14, and is March 7 for all other proposals. (http://jan-tng.mannlib.cornell.edu:8080/jasigconf/call-form.jsp?conf_id=jasig12)

11. Johns Hopkins University Sponsors uPortal Developer Conference

Johns Hopkins University has offered to sponsor the spring JA-SIG uPortal Developers Meeting. This spring's conference will be held Monday and Tuesday, April 23 and 24, 2007, 9 AM to 4 PM each day. However, developers are encouraged to stay for the remainder of the week (April 25 - 27) for an extended coding session. The purpose of the coding session is to give developers a chance to work together in person on the coding of uPortal 2.x and uPortal 3.

Johns Hopkins University's Department of Network Services is donating use of the Mt. Washington Conference Center, just outside of Baltimore, as the site of the meeting. Breakfasts, lunches, and snacks will be provided to attendees. A wireless internet connection will be available, but developers will need to bring their own laptops.

Further information about the meeting may be found on the JA-SIG wiki: http://tinyurl.com/38c4kp.

Jonathan Markow
JA-SIG Board Chair

12. Unicon Openings

Unicon is seeking Java Developers for both contract and hire positions. Listing: http://www.unicon.net/company_292.html