200709 September 2007 JASIG Newsletter uPortal contribution

Since the previous newsletter, Eric Dalquist has generously taken on release engineering activities around a near-term uPortal 2.6.1 patch release, towards which an RC1 is already available on the uPortal downloads site. This release includes fixes to the improved portlet deployment utility contributed by Drew Wills and maintained in this patch via collaboration with Brad Johnson and others. This release may also include a fix for UP-1816, which tracks a serious issue in support for JSR-168 portlet sessions and a proposed fix spearheaded by Eric Dalquist and successfully tested by an increasing number of uPortal developers. It is not too late to help test this patch and thereby to expedite its inclusion in uPortal. Several other bugs are also fixed in 2.6.1 RC1.

Progress towards a near-term, evolutionary uPortal 3 release continues, with Maven2ization (the first major architectural change identified in the roadmap) completed in an exploratory branch and ready for merge into the trunk, thanks primarily to the efforts of Eric Dalquist and Elliot Metsger. The planned next major effort towards this near-term evolutionary uPortal 3 release is using Spring more extensively and in a more prinicpled way, possibly via adoption of Spring WebMVC as the top web tier of the software, and possibly including adoption of Acegi (Spring Security).

Increasingly, uPortal developers are discussing and collaborating in an IRC chat room hosted by freenode. Connection information and logs are available in the wiki.

-Andrew Petro et. al.