Summer of Code 2009 Ideas
- Jason Jason
- Jim Helwig
- Andrew Petro
Let's track these under a master list at Mentorable Projects
This page is intended to capture ideas for possible student projects for Google Summer of Code or similar programs. Ideas should be related to uPortal, and must include a sponsor who would be willing to mentor and work with a student. Sponsors additionally commit to ensuring ongoing maintenance of any code developed as part of this program.
Idea |
Description |
Sponsor |
|---|---|---|
Asynchronous portlet rendering |
Modify the uPortal rendering process to support asynchronously rendering portlets, probably using AJAX to perform composition and aggregation of portlet content at the browser level, instead of using the current rendering buffer approach. The asynchronous rendering functionality should gracefully degrade to support browsers and rendering devices that do not support javascript, using techniques such as progressive enhancement. |
|
Gadget/OpenSocial Portlet |
Produce a portlet which will run in a standard portlet container (targeting uPortal as the reference platform) that would serve as a Google Gadget and/or OpenSocial container. |
|
uPortal Search Framework |
Develop a search framework that would allow for searching within the portal environment. Implementation should include an index of published content & descriptions (e.g. keywords, titles, descriptions) as well as the ability for portlets to participate in the indexing. One example might be a webproxy or RSS portlet supporting an optional interface that would allow them to return an index of the information retrieved by the portlet, which could then be returned as part of search results. Or an addressbook portlet might export an interface to local and remote directories. Other functionality which should be investigated is the ability of this search service to plug into a broader search framework, e.g. acting as a data source for something like a Google Search Appliance. |
|
JSR-168 re-implementation of uPortal Announcements Channel |
There is a successful, featureful, and otherwise excellent open source IChannel announcements platform originally developed by Columbia and since customized by USC and SJDC (with Unicon engaged to execute some of that customization). This project would be to: understand and recognize the existing featureset, implement a new JSR-168 portlet using Spring PortletMVC and JSR-168 conventions (uPortal groups are bound to JSR-168 roles which are then consumed via the JSR-168 API rather than the portlet having direct awareness of uPortal Groups and Permissions? Using Groups and Permissions as an API dependency?), making the excellent features of this announcements channel available in a more modern, JSR-168 standard, Spring-framework-using implementation. This may help the uPortal project to re-centralize announcements and alerts efforts on to a shared portlet-implemented announcements platform. |