Newsletter - January 2007 (DRAFT)

1. Message from the Editor

Welcome from the Editor: Introductions, schedule, contents and how to submit

Hi everyone. I've been involved for several years in the JA-SIG uPortal community, and am pleased to be able to help share some of the various activities and news from many quarters. This newsletter is expected to be published monthly, towards the middle of the month and is intended to communicate information of interest to JA-SIG members including: JA-SIG news, project updates, and upcoming events. If anyone has items which they feel would be of interest to the JA-SIG membership, they may email them to jayshao@rutgers.edu for consideration for the next issue. Please include a subject line containing: NEWSLETTER-CONTRIBUTION with any contributions.

Jason Shao
Editor, JA-SIG Newsletter

2. JA-SIG Membership

Princeton, NJ - January 24, 2007 - JA-SIG, the non-profit organization focusing on the sharing of open technology in higher education, today announced a new membership program and benefits designed to attract worldwide educational institutions and commercial supporters of its enterprise open source applications, including: uPortal, CAS (Centralized Authentication Service), and HyperContent (the full-featured web content management application). The uPortal Project has reached new levels of maturity as adoption continues and technology contributions are received from institutions and commercial partners. With this increasing market penetration, JA-SIG is expanding its membership outreach and program benefits to support additional organizational growth, increased institutional participation, and broader commercial support. Membership information can be found at: http://www.JA-SIG.org/membership.html and the uPortal software can be downloaded at: http://uportal.org/release/allReleases.html.

As the uPortal community expands globally, it is important that the JA-SIG organization grows and evolves in order to best serve the community, our institutional members, and commercial affiliates. The success of our new membership program will allow us to provide the product development planning and organizational structure needed to maintain uPortal, and our other applications, as robust open source alternatives to proprietary software. And, our members will now be able to actively participate in the organization by nominating and voting on board members and by serving on project steering committees.

For the full press release see: http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/070124/0206562.html

Jonathan Markow
JA-SIG Board Chair

4. JA-SIG 2006 Winter Conference (Atlanta, GA)

The most-often heard complaint at the JA-SIG Winter Conference in Atlanta this December was that there was too much choice – too many good topics to choose from in too few time slots. With three presentation tracks and a BOF/Seminar track, the two days of the conference went by too fast for many, with not enough time for face-to-face meetings, discussions, debates, and just catching-up with colleagues. The presentation materials for all the track sessions are being collected in the wiki, arranged according to the program schedule for easy identification.

Memorable highlights include:

• The uPortal 3 Roadmap: & announcement of Release Candidate 1
• New governance plans and membership structure: 21 institutions having already signed up at the time of the conference.
• User Experience and User Interface issues: Strong interest in user experience issues, including a visit by the very ambitious FLUID Project, which plans to build rich technical solutions to user-interface and accessibility challenges across projects/technologies.
• Partnerships with other community source efforts: Sakai, Kuali Rice, and Kuali Student were all well represented at the conference.
• AJAX: The program included a pair of sessions on AJAX, which turned out to be a popular choice for many attendees.
• Commercial Support: Unicon has announced the availability of support contracts for JA-SIG open-source products.

In addition to the usual crowd of dedicated JA-SIG members, there was a gratifyingly-large number of first-time participants at the conference. Overall the mood of the conference was one of energy, enthusiasm, optimism, and commitment; promising great new advances in the coming year. For those who attended, what did you think of the conference? What was the high point for you? Why not share your impressions with your colleagues at the JA-SIG Conference Planning wiki space? There's a good chance that the program committee will read your comments and use your ideas in planning next conference, scheduled for June 2007 in Denver.

Paul Zablosky
JA-SIG 2006 Winter Conference Committee Chair

5. User Experience Initiatives

The JA-SIG Winter 2006 conference unveiled several promising user experience currents.

Foremost was the first release candidate of uPortal 3. This next version of uPortal lays the foundation for significant improvements in the user experience of the portal including support for the highly-touted AJAX and one of its popular by-products, drag-and-drop. Kudos to Peter Kharchenko for his work in implementing the drag-and-drop. Other user experience gains were made in the uPortal 3 theme regarding Web standards, accessibility, and improved usability - big thanks to Shawn Lonas for his work on the uPortal 3 theme. All of these improvements map up to the uPortal 3 user experience goals (http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/z0E). If you are interested in AJAX, drag-and-drop, Web standards, accessibility, or usability, join the user experience email list (details follow) and participate in the user experience activity on the JA-SIG wiki ( http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/OEo).

Another announcement of note was the introduction of the Fluid Project. Colin Clark of the University of Toronto visited the conference and gave an overview of the project (see an overview of the Fluid technical architecture at http://colin.atrc.utoronto.ca/fluidproject/FluidProjectTechnicalOverview.pdf). This exciting project will be looking at creating a UI component library of flexible, accessible, and usable interface components. We will be keeping up with the project as it progresses and evaluate how it can integrate with uPortal 3.

The User Experience Birds of a Feather at the Winter conference was well attended, demonstrating the desire of the community to improve uPortal's user experience. I encourage you to view the notes from the UE BoF here: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/cUo.

User experience discussion now has an official home! Any and all user experience topics can now be discussed on the JA-SIG user experience email list (jasig-ue@lists.ja-sig.org). To join, go to: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/40k. I look forward to hearing from you.

Gary Thompson
Unicon

5. Unicon's Announces New Cooperative Support Program for uPortal

Unicon, Inc. recently introduced a new uPortal Cooperative Support Program for higher education. It features a dedicated team of expert development and technical support specialists for uPortal to provide direct technical support and assistance to individual subscriber institutions in the program. This new program is consistent with the open source philosophy of contributing features and fixes towards the overall progress of uPortal, as the resulting enhancements will be shared with the open source community. It also addresses individual institution's need for a predictable cost support solution for uPortal.

Support issues are managed on a priority basis with an escalation mechanism available for high priority issues. All development work performed by the team will be undertaken in direct participation uPortal open source Web portal initiative. The uPortal Cooperative Support Program is a strong complement to Unicon's professional services for uPortal which include various bundled services comprised of implementation, project planning, installation, configuration, branding, and training components. More information is available at: http://www.unicon.net/support_1123.html.

Unicon

5. uPortal: 3.0-RC1, 2.5.4 update

uPortal 3.0.0-RC1 was released on the 27th of November. This release is a significant step for the uPortal 3 project. The portal framework is near functional completeness. This functionality includes simple layout managment, full groups and permissions support, functional layout management with Drag and Drop support, bookmarkable tabs and a large number of internal bug and feature enhancements. There are also a core set of functional portlets included in the release which provide Web Proxying, XSLT, InlineFrame and Bookmarks along with a uPortal 2 IChannel adapter. The RC1 is ready for people to download and work with in a testing and pilot environment. Short term plans are focused on working with people piloting the framework to address bugs found in the RC. Medium term plans include a refactoring effort to use Maven 2, migration to Pluto 1.1 and import/export utilities for initial data population. Longer term plans include porting DLM to uPortal 3. There is a RC2 release planned for mid-January 2007 which will mainly focus on bug fixes from the previous month of work with pilot institutions.

Eric Dalquist
uPortal 3 Release Engineer

A hearty welcome to Paul Gazda as a new uPortal committer. Thanks to Drew Wills, UnionSecurityContext now supports computing the union of any ISecurityContext implementations, and not just ChainingSecurityContext subclasses. Thanks to Cris Holdorph, uPortal 2.5.4 and uPortal 2.6 will compile under JDK 6 by virtue of his enhancements to RDBMServices. Eric Dalquist has begun soliciting volunteers for hosting the next uPortal Developers' Meeting and persons interested in attending should look out for a date/location announcement.

Andrew Petro
uPortal 2.5.x Release Engineer

6. Hypercontent 2.1-RC1

The Java Architectures Special Interest Group (JA-SIG) is proud to announce a release candidate for version 2.1 of HyperContent, a web and portlet content management system that scales from workgroups to the enterprise. This release candidate is available in a pre-integrated bundle with uPortal 2.5.3 and CAS 3.0.5, forming a trio of JA-SIG products that delivers an out-of-the-box solution for enterprise portal, content management and single sign-on. HyperContent 2.1 takes a new role in this architecture via its new JSR-168 portlet, offering direct presentation and in-place editing of portlet content.

HyperContent 2.1 offers a raft of new features on top of the robust web content management and publishing architecture introduced a year ago in version 2.0, including search based collections, file browsing for links and images, portlet editing and publishing, blog support, and much more! The new release also contains a starter project that gives you a solid base from which to build web sites of any size and structure using best practices. A documentation effort is currently underway to make it easier than ever to get up and running with HyperContent.

Download the release at: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/hypercontent/uPortal_HyperContent_CAS.zip

Alex Vigdor
Hypercontent Architect & Lead Developer

7. CAS: Server 3.1m1, 3.0.7, Documentation Efforts

On January 24th, 2007, the JA-SIG CAS project released CAS Server 3.1 Milestone 1, a technology preview of its next major release. This preview includes a re-architected web tier to support multiple authentication protocols concurrently. Milestone 1 demonstrates this capability by being able to speak both the CAS protocol and the SAML 1.1 protocol. With support for SAML 1.1, comes the ability to send attributes about the user back to the client application. The newest CAS Client for Java 3.1 Milestone 1 demonstrates this with its ability to "speak" SAML 1.1. Note that as these releases are technology previews, and are thus "sneak peaks", they are not intended for production use. The upcoming Milestone 2 of the CAS Server 3.1 will include better support for managing Services that use CAS.

Within the next few weeks, the CAS project will also release a CAS 3.0.7 maintenance release which will update dependencies and fix any outstanding bugs. There are currently no planned maintenance releases for the CAS Client for Java.

The CAS team is currently looking for volunteers to collaborate on an effort to improve the existing CAS documentation, including CAS server configuration options, CAS client configuration, and tutorials on customizing CAS. If you are interested in helping, please contact Scott Battaglia <scott.battaglia@gmail.com>.

Scott Battaglia
CAS Server 3.0 Lead Developer

9. JA-SIG With Altitude: Call For Proposals

Deadline for submission of proposals for half or full day seminars: Feb 7, 2007
Deadline for submission of proposals for regular one hour sessions: March 7, 2007

Now open for the JA-SIG Summer 2007 Conference. We welcome your proposals in the following areas:

• Addressing the Enterprise
  This is the track for enterprise strategies and partner-based solutions where the topics are: making community source work in the enterprise; investing in community source; governance, support, and risk reduction; where policy, requirements, and technology meet; executive planning and strategy; integration with infrastructure; the value of service-oriented architecture and web services models; project oversight, user requirements; working with functional offices; change management; marketing and promotion.
• Projects, Applications, and Solutions
  In this track the focus is applications and how they are implemented to deliver solutions. Topics include project management, application solution deployment, operational and configuration issues, load balancing, portals and portlets, content management, channel development, repository management, release management, identity management, authentication and authorization, service-oriented architecture, and database management.
• Design and Technical Development
  This track covers everything to do with coding and the environments in which coding is done, including the design process. If your interests include building code, understanding APIs and protocols, or design work that leads to code, this is the track for you. Topics include technical aspects of Java IDEs, development frameworks, Spring, WSRP, AJAX, Eclipse, Hibernate, Java Server Faces, WS-*, and Kuali Rice as well as the technical underpinnings of services such as CAS and uPortal.
• SAKAI Project Topics
  This track is designed for content pertaining to Sakai at all levels. A special addition to this year's JA-SIG summer conference, it is designed particularly for people who cannot attend this year's Sakai Conference in Amsterdam. Topics will include updates and information from the Amsterdam Conference.

Proposal forms, topic suggestions, and contact information are provided on the JA-SIG Conference Website. Submit your proposal and join the JA-SIG crowd in Denver this June!
For all the details, visit http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/07summer/index.html