Meta considerations

Audience

Who is the intended audience for this release announcement?

This announcement is intended for the existing JA-SIG audience, who are already loosely familiar with JA-SIG and with uPortal (i.e., existing mailing lists, place on our website, etc.). This document is not the "uPortal for people who are new to portals and open source" document. This document is also not targeted at the very "in" crowd of uPortal developers, who would want to consume something more technical.

Where to publish

• Email to existing lists
• JA-SIG website
• uPortal website
• Press release on news wire?

Actual release announcement draft

JA-SIG Releases uPortal 3.0.0-GA for Production Use

The JA-SIG uPortal Project Steering Committee is extremely pleased to announce the release of uPortal 3.0, the next generation community source portal platform designed by and for the higher education community. The new release marks a major, evolutionary step forward for the award-winning project. Version 3.0 has brought the rock solid, high performing uPortal 2.x product to a new level, incorporating current best practices in enterprise Java.  The entire uPortal community can unite on one branch moving forward, and it is now possible for everyone to migrate to the latest version of uPortal when appropriate for their institution.

uPortal 3.0 builds upon the flexibility and reliability of uPortal 2.x while providing an attractive look and feel using improved JavaScript libraries, even more robust portlet support, a modern build environment, use of leading Java frameworks (Spring), and other enhancements, bringing the larger deployments and performance already achieved in uPortal 2 in easier reach of more uPortal adopters.

"JA-SIG is proud of the work that has resulted uPortal 3.0," said executive director Jonathan Markow.  "Our community of developers has put together a release that gives uPortal a solid, improved platform for future growth---one that provides immediate benefits to users, implementers, and developers."

"3.0 is a significant step for the uPortal framework which positions it to take advantage of many exciting technologies such as Portlets 2.0, Java Persistence Architecture, and the Spring Framework," said Eric Dalquist, uPortal 3.0 Release Engineer

"The Yale portal team is very excited about the release of uPortal 3.0," said Susan Bramhall, Sr. Developer, Yale University ITS.  "It provides a really solid base for carrying forward our YaleInfo portal user experience extensions.  We will be testing a version of YaleInfo built on uPortal 3.0 with users later this month.  Thank you, uP3 team!"

What's New in uPortal 3.0

• A new theme and skin provide a fresh and attractive look out of the box.  It's now far easier for implementers to customize the look of uPortal.  Skinning can be done entirely with CSS. 
• uPortal's out-of-the-box default content has been changed to better demonstrate the portal's features.
• A comprehensive set of import/export scripts now makes it easier to upgrade to the latest version of uPortal. 
• Portlet support is now provided using the Pluto 1.1 container, which will allow us to more readily support JSR 286, the more versatile and powerful Portlet 2.0 standard, once it has been finalized.
• A Maven-based project structure and build process is now standard, providing robust build, reporting and packaging tools.
• Core components of the framework have been migrated to the Spring Java Development Framework, making it simpler for developers to work with uPortal. The migration to Spring has also served to significantly reduce the amount of underlying code.
• Given the success and widespread adoption of JA-SIG CAS for authentication, CAS is now configured as the default authentication system for uPortal.
• A unified caching framework provides multiple cache implementation options including clusterable and distributable caches. 
• Remote management using JMX makes it easier to monitor performance and troubleshoot problems.

How do I get it? What version should I use?

Source and Quick Start downloads are available on the uPortal Downloads page. The Quick Start version comes with uPortal, Tomcat 5.5, Ant, Maven and is ready to run on any machine with JDK5 or later. There is also a developer targeted dashboard site which includes JavaDocs, dependency information and test reports.

JA-SIG recommends that institutions consider using uPortal 3 for new portal installations. Several large schools are already working on upgrading their installations to this new version, assuring that this version will receive the high level of support that the community has been accustomed to with uPortal 2.

Implementations currently using uPortal 2 can also be assured that support for that version continues.

Thanks to all who have helped!

• uPortal 3.0 release management, Spring migration - Eric Dalquist from UW-Madison
• Maven project structure and build - Thanks to Elliot Metsger form Johns Hopkins and Eric Dalquist
• Pluto 1.1 portlet container - Thanks to Eric Dalquist
• Import / Export scripts - Thanks to Andrew Wills from Unicon
• New Theme, Skin and default content - Thanks to Gary Thompson from Unicon and Jen Bourey from Yale
• CAS 3.2 as the default authentication mechanism - Thanks to Scott Battaglia from Rutgers, Andrew Petro from Unicon and Jen Bourey
•  Thanks to Tuyhang Ly from Rutgers for testing.

How to get involved

We encourage you to test drive the uPortal 3.0 Quick Start download. You can join in uPortal discussions by signing up to the uportal-user mailing list or the other uPortal and JA-SIG mailing lists. You can also visit the project wiki where there are many helpful pages.

You can file bug reports or track the status of existing issues in the JA-SIG Issue Tracker.

And please consider having your institution join JA-SIG! In addition to voting privileges and conference discounts, membership fees help make uPortal even better.

end of release