Matt Young - Duke University

Bio

Matt Young is a Senior Technologist at Duke University.  He works in the central IT organization's Internet Framework Services (http://www.oit.duke.edu/about/groups/ifs.html) division - a group charged with providing frameworks upon which software can be built.  This includes providing a portal framework (uPortal), content management system (Cascade Server), and creation of central, network-based services that add value to other software systems.  He is currently the technical team lead, involved in all aspects of software development.

Matt attended Syracuse University for his undergraduate work, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for his graduate studies.  Both were in computer science, although his graduate studies specialized in 3-D computer graphics and virtual reality systems.  After graduate school, Matt worked on real-time graphics systems for ESPN, ABC, and FOX sports for a year before being hired by Duke University in 1996 as one of their first strictly web-based developers.  When the PeopleSoft Student Information System implementation came around, Matt created a custom web-based application that still handles Duke's class registration, self-service student record management, and provides staff access to a much friendlier interface than the off-the-shelf PeopleSoft client.

Java is Matt's primary programming language, and he is interested in using inversion of control frameworks to make software easier to develop, test, maintain, and reuse.  He is also interested in the evolution of software development practice.  These days, his toolkit is never without the Spring Framework, and often includes Hibernate, AspectJ, and Lucene.  

For the past 7 years, Matt has been active in the JA-SIG community by attending conferences, collaborating with other institutions, and promoting uPortal's adoption at his own university. 

Platform Statement 

I believe that uPortal's primary focus should be to maintain its status as the leading portal solution for educational institutions.  This requires a careful evolution over time, with deliberate but innovative forward thinking.  

There are four areas that I believe should be the focus of uPortal development.  They are, in no particular order:

Stability
Educational institutions need to provide a level of reliability and scalability to their constituents.  Adoption of an open-source solution is dependent on, among other things, the demonstrated reliable performance of uPortal comparable peers and the ability to scale to a very large userbase with a reasonable hardware installation.  As features are added and architecture changed within the portal framework, attention must be given to ensure that stability is increased with every release, and that scalability is not harmed by the inclusion of new features.  Stability in the area of security is also critical, as the portal is often a gateway for sensitive student and employee information.  Institutions that support a medical center are not only covered by FERPA requirements, but HIPAA as well.  uPortal should strive to make administrators comfortable with the protections and auditing put in place where such information is concerned.

Utility to the Education Market
Large multinational corporations share a big challenge with the educational community - the need to provide 24x7 uptime to support large, diverse user bases that are possibly not centrally located.  However, unlike corporations, educational institutions often exist in very heterogeneous technical environments and don't often have the luxury of working on a single platform, with a single authentication source, and centrally managed services to track users and data.  uPortal does and should continue to appeal to adopters of common educational and administrative software systems including learning management, content management, student records, and financial systems.  An awareness of adaptability and interoperability in these spaces is a critical differentiator between uPortal and other portal frameworks.

Innovation
uPortal is a JSR-168 compliant portal framework, and should continue to comply with standards set forth by the larger Java community, including JSR-268.  However, uPortal was a leader before there was a standard for portals, and the uPortal community should think continually about the evolution of portal software.  Similar offerings from people like Yahoo and other non-JSR-168 portals should be surveyed and the value added by both interface and content offerings they provide should be considered for their usefulness within an educational portal.  What other innovations can JA-SIG bring to the software world?  A portal is a flexible framework, and as the evolution of web services creates the possibility of ever more interaction, uPortal should position itself to be able to quickly adapt to these offerings through features and simplicity of architecture. 

Non-Competition
As a non-profit entity that represents non-profit institutions, JA-SIG should strive to make the world a better place for everyone.  Because of this, I feel that uPortal should be written and offered in such a way that its modules can be easily used in other environments where a similar problem set needs to be solved.  Furthermore, where standards are present in the software development world, uPortal should use them so that as other projects produce usable, consumable products, that uPortal (and all of JA-SIG) can benefit from them.  The needs of educational institutions are often unique, but the software development best practices that they employ should be the same as the world at large.