Newsletter - 200809 - September 2008

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Last updated: Sept 19, 2008Version comment
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JA-SIG Newsletter - September 2008

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1 Upcoming Events

1.1 Announcing the 2009 JASIG Spring Conference
1.2 JASIG Fall 2008 Unconference (October 6-8, 2008)
1.3 Fall 2008 Internet2 Member Meeting (October 13-16, 2008)
1.4 EDUCAUSE 2008 - Orlando, Florida (October 28-31, 2008)

2 JA-SIG Project Updates

2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)
2.1.1 Recent CAS Deployers
2.1.2 mod_auth_cas Updates
2.1.3 CAS Server 3.3.1 In the Works
2.1.4 CAS @ The UnConference
2.2 uPortal
2.2.1 uPortal 3.0.2 GA Release Announcement

3 Around JA-SIG

3.1 Johns Hopkins Launches uPortal 3
3.2 Campus Technology Article Features uPortal 3
3.3 Second-Level CAS Server Now Available
3.4 CAS Extensions Contributed to JA-SIG
3.5 Cernunnos 1.0 Released

4 JA-SIG Community Profile

4.1 An Interview with Matt Peterson (UNE Australia) – JASIG's First uPortal 3 Implementation

5 Job Postings

5.1 Sakai Foundation - Quality Assurance Director
5.2 Kuali Foundation (2) - Quality Assurance Director and Member Liaison

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1 Upcoming Events

1.1 Announcing the 2009 JASIG Spring Conference

Save the Dates!

Announcing the 2009 JASIG Spring Conference
Sunday, March 1 - Wednesday, March 4
Join JASIG and the greater higher education open source community

Dallas, Texas
The Sheraton Dallas Hotel http://tinyurl.com/6ch662

Watch for more information soon! http://www.ja-sig.org

See you in Dallas this coming March,
The 2009 JASIG Spring Conference Committee

1.2 JASIG Fall 2008 Unconference (October 6-8, 2008)

All the latest information on the JASIG Fall Unconference can be found on the conference web site at: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JCON/Fall+2008+Unconference+Madison

We look forward to seeing you in Madison!

1.3 Fall 2008 Internet2 Member Meeting (October 13-16, 2008)

Dates: October 13-16, 2008
Place: New Orleans, Louisiana (Sheraton New Orleans Hotel)

"The Fall 2008 Internet2 Member Meeting provides the community an opportunity to share the latest information on timely issues and rapidly evolving areas of interest. The fall program will offer sessions that highlight innovative uses of advanced networking for research and teaching, as well as technical sessions on the development and evolution of high-performance network infrastructures in support of local to global cyberinfrastructure. Sessions will focus on initiatives and projects that explore ways in which advanced network applications, services, tools, and digital content empower and enhance the capability of research and education communities. In addition, the program will focus on the challenges of Business Continuity Planning and the progress of Health Science and Teaching and Learning/K20 initiatives. Case studies of how advanced networking has succeeded in enabling research and education, why, and what others can learn from this success are also encouraged."

Source: http://events.internet2.edu/2008/fall-mm/calls.cfm

1.4 EDUCAUSE 2008 - Orlando, Florida (October 28-31, 2008)

"Mark your calendar for the premier information technology event in higher education, EDUCAUSE 2008, October 28-31 in Orlando, Florida. The program 'Interaction, Ideas, Inspiration' will include preconference seminars; track and poster sessions; small group meetings; and corporate exhibits, presentations, and workshops. ... "

Source: EDUCAUSE 2008 Web Site - http://www.educause.edu/e08

2 JA-SIG Project Updates

2.1 Central Authentication Service (CAS)

2.1.1 New CAS Deployers

We welcome the following new CAS deployers:
University of Oregon

2.1.2 mod_auth_cas Updates

mod_auth_cas 1.0.8 has been officially tagged as a release in your favorite SVN repository. It contains a few minor bug/nuisance fixes for some JIRA issues, as well as a new OpenSSL license exception to facilitate packaging within various Linux distributions. The README has also been updated to include suggested fixes for the entropy slowdown that some users are experiencing.

If you have any questions/comments/compliments/bug reports, please feel free to send them to myself or Matt Smith, as well as open a JIRA issue documenting the situation.
(Submitted by Phil Ames)

2.1.3 CAS Server 3.3.1 In the Works

Work is currently being done on the CAS Server 3.3.1 release which will include fixes for some minor bugs including the RESTful API, a change in Tomcat behavior, and enhancements to the way the project uses PersonDirectory.

2.1.4 CAS @ The UnConference

Be sure to join us at the UnConference as the steering committee meets for the first time, the roadmap is finalized, and the discussions on future protocols continues. Rutgers will also be sharing information about its upcoming local initiative to develop a registry.

Contributed by:
ScottS (Rutgers University), Lead Developer, JA-SIG Central Authentication Service

2.2 uPortal

2.2.1 uPortal 3.0.2 GA Announcement

JA-SIG is proud to announce the General Audience release of uPortal 3.0.2 GA. This release is the result of feedback from the significant interest and use of the 3.0.0 and 3.0.1 releases.

Full release notes are available along with a uPortal 3.0 release overview.

This release includes the following new features and fixes along with over 25 total resolved Jira issues:

  • Significant performance improvements
  • Consistent rendering of dynamic portlet titles
  • Administrative control over if a dynamic portlet title should be displayed
  • Fix a CAR file loading regression from 2.6
  • Cleaned up JSR-168 CSS support
  • Resolved stack-overflow when using RemoteUserPersonManager

Source and Quick Start downloads are available on the uPortal Downloads page. JavaDocs and developer-centric materials are available on the project's Maven site.

This release is ready for general use. If you do find any issues, please file them in the JA-SIG Issue Tracker.

I want to thank everyone who contributed to the development both directly and indirectly. Having this developer community available for both code and design insight has been invaluable.

uPortal 3 Release Engineer,
Eric Dalquist

3 Around JA-SIG

3.1 Johns Hopkins Launches uPortal 3

After months of planning and heads down development, Johns Hopkins is (finally!) pleased to announce our successful upgrade to uPortal 3. We flipped the switch at 8:00 PM EDT, on Thursday August 21st, 2008, replacing our previous 2.6.1+ instance. In addition to the version upgrade, we also launched 3 new portal skins as developed by Gary Thompson and crew.

Though the public facing Portal itself does not house much content, you can at least give our updated Enterprise Search a spin. I will post screenshots to the JA-SIG wiki in the coming days of what it looks like on the inside. In addition, I will try and expand upon our upgrade experience - which was not without pain - on the uPortal3 Adoption page. For now, feel free to take a peek from one of our three entry URLs:

Johns Hopkins University http://my.jhu.edu/

Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions http://my.jhmi.edu/

Johns Hopkins Institutions (uses the JHU skin for the time being) http://my.johnshopkins.edu/

We enlisted Unicon to assist us with this huge undertaking. As always, it has been a pleasure banging out bugs and developing new and exciting enhancements with Drew Wills, many of which he has already discussed on the lists and begun committing back to the project. Other enhancements and highlights that may not have been previously discussed include:

  • Incorporation of an updated and Maven-ized version of the esup-portal-ws Project
  • Development of a custom Person Attributes PreInterceptor for the UW-Madison Web Proxy Portlet
  • Updated HttpCookiePersonAttributeDao and HttpHeaderPersonAttributeDao for use with person-directory (see PERSONDIR-37)
  • Usage of the yuicompressor-maven-plugin for build-time minification of CSS and JS artifacts

We would like to extend a very gracious thank you to all those in the community who have helped turn our vision into reality (apologies in advance for anyone I left out!): Drew Wills, Elliot Metsger, Eric Dalquist, Gary Thompson, Jen Bourey, Lennard Fuller, Pascal Aubry...just to name a few. In addition, I would like to personally thank Scott Gibson and my old crew at the University of Maryland, who are currently working heads down on the Kuali Student Services System, for regular sanity checks and motivation throughout this entire process.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Isaac Newton

Cheers,
--Former user (Deleted)

[ c h r i s d o y l e ]
Johns Hopkins University
Sr. System Software Engineer, IT@JH

3.2 Campus Technology Article Features uPortal 3

The September 2008 edition of Campus Technology features a lengthy article on "5 Best Practices for Building Your Portal in a Web 2.0 World". uPortal 3 is featured prominently, and kudos are given to University of Wisconsin-Madison for their outstanding work, as well as to "open-source guru Unicon," a JA-SIG Commercial Affiliate, for their expertise.

According to Campus Technology, "When JA-SIG, the nonprofit organization devoted to the promotion of Java architecures, released uPortal 3.0 earlier this year, open source fanatics at colleges and universities across the country ballyhooed what they called a 'revolutionary step' in the lifespan of open source portals."

There is an excellent sidebar by uPortal Project Steering Committee member, Unicon's Andrew Petro, assessing the "State of the (Portal) Union". uPortal 3 lead developer and release engineer Eric Dalquist, from University of Wisconsin-Madison, is featured in another sidebar, "Open Source Fanatics Embrace uPortal 3". Eric enumerates the new features that have attracted so much attention to the latest uPortal release. JA-SIG Board director and UWMadison Portal Project Manager, Jim Helwig, describes how uPortal has enriched the student experience at the university.

The "5 Best Practices" article may be found on page 41 of the September magazine and online at http://www.campustechnology.com/articles/67076_6/ .

3.3 Second-Level CAS Server Now Available

UC Berkeley and Unicon are pleased to announce that the Second-Level CAS contribution is now available as an add-on package to CAS server. Documentation, software, and installation instructions are available here: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/CASUM/Second-Level+CAS+Server .

Contributed by: Adam Rybicki, Unicon, Inc.

3.4 CAS Extensions Contributed to JA-SIG

We would like to announce availability of a CAS extension that allows proxying of clear-text passwords to select services. These extensions were designed for Sacramento State and they are making it available to the rest of the community.

While enabling single sign-on through standard CAS protocols is certainly the preferred approach, some third-party applications can not be modified to accommodate such workflow, and require an actual password to be provided to them. The developed ClearPass extension provides a secure way to hand-off the clear-text password information to a limited set of CAS-enabled applications, so that the password can be utilized for authentication with a downstream legacy service. This allows, for instance, to enable single sign-on of uPortal users into a MS Exchange server that would not be able to process CAS proxy tickets.

The implementation is described on the JA-SIG wiki - http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/x/BIDc , and the code is available in the JA-SIG SVN repository.

Contributed by: Peter Kharchenko (Deactivated), Unicon, Inc.

3.5 Cernunnos 1.0 Released

Congratulations to Drew Wills and all those involved with the successful release of Cernunnos 1.0. For further information on the Cernunnos Project and information on the recent release, visit the associated Google Code web site , and Drew's blog.

4 JA-SIG Community Profile

4.1 An Interview with Matt Peterson (UNE Australia) – JASIG's First uPortal 3 Implementation

The University of New England, NSW, Australia, was the first institution to announce it had gone into production with uPortal 3. In this month's Community Profile, Matt Peterson, one of five web developers working as a J2EE shop within the IT Directorate at UNE, talks about the university's uPortal experience.

Jonathan Markow
JASIG Executive Director

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Q. Matt, first tell us about The University of New England.

A. UNE is a regional University with its main campus situated in the New South Wales city of Armidale, which sits approximately half-way between Sydney and Brisbane on the eastern seaboard of Australia. UNE has an enrolled student body of approximately 17,000. Of those, about 15,000 study off-campus via UNE's Distance Education program. With more than 12.500 students (74% of UNE students) studying 600 subjects via the Internet, UNE has a dependency on reliable online infrastructure which has been developed for the University sector.

Q. When did UNE first implement uPortal? What led the school to choose uPortal as its portal platform?

A. uPortal was implemented as the University's first student portal framework in November 2005, about five months before I began working here. It was dubbed 'myUNE'. We started with uPortal v2.4.2 and have since been through v2.5.3 and are now at v3.0.1. I'm not sure of the analysis done in choosing a portal framework, as it was all done before I started working here, but I believe that the very active community support together with the fact that quite a number of large international universities had implemented and endorsed uPortal contributed heavily to giving it the edge over the other main players, namely Liferay.

Q. How is uPortal used at the school?

A. uPortal, today, is used as the University's portal for both our staff and students. It is used to provide a one-stop-shop for all resources related to the user. From within myUNE a student can:

  • Enroll in subjects;
  • Update personal account details;
  • Access customized information about their online learning components within either BlackBoard or Sakai;
  • View subject results;
  • Find out about their upcoming exams (venue, date & time, etc...);
  • View latest news from UNE;
  • Be alerted to upcoming IT outages, launches & other events;
  • View past exams for their subjects;
  • View the status of learning material which has been posted to them;
  • Search the University Library for books, journals, papers, lecture notes and other articles;
  • Give us feedback;
  • View assignment due dates for their subjects;
  • Subscribe to get results via SMS;
  • Access all sorts of support and assistance from study to personal to IT and others;
  • Check the weather forecast; and
  • More!

On a more technical level, uPortal is integrated with our single sign-on service (CAS), LDAP, Oracle 10g DB using JNDI defined connection pooling and is installed on Tomcat 5.5.25 which is running on Java 6 JVM.

Because of the scarceness of resources here, we have had to make the decision not to enable (and therefore maintain and support) user customization of myUNE for the time being. So, users are not able to move channels or tabs, remove channels or tabs, add channels or tabs or even customize channel settings. We have also decided not to implement multiple skins for the same reason.

Q. Is there much use of open source in Australia? In higher education? Would you know how adoption of open source there compares to the US or Europe?

A. I'm sure there is, but I'm not able to give you any figures. There is a definite perception, though, of lack of support around open source products which I know heavily influences managers' decisions to choose commercial products over open source products. Open source products also generally have a reputation for being of inferior quality when compared to commercial products.

Q. Given those misperceptions about open source (which are still all too common in many other corners of the world (smile), it could be helpful to be part of a wider community with similar goals. Do any of the other Australian universities participate in activities that could offer mutual support around shared technology?

A. Yes, it would be helpful if there were an Australian domestic community of uPortal implementers. Don't get me wrong - the international uPortal community is great, but UNE uses some products developed solely for Australian Universities and so are not used by the international uPortal community. Australian Universities are generally very cooperative when it comes to sharing information on common technologies and goals. We have experienced that with other products we have implemented - even commercial ones. As yet, though, I have not come across any other Australian University who is implementing/has implemented uPortal.

Q. Many universities are in the middle of their uPortal 3 implementations right now. Generally, what was your experience like? Were there any challenges that were particularly difficult to work through?

A. Our experience with implementing uPortal 3 was relatively great. By that I mean relative to uPortal 2.5.3 (ALM). Being the first release of a major version change, however, there was always going to be some challenges involved, but I was happy enough to be a pioneer. Most of the custom configuration for integrating in with other systems (LDAP, CAS, Oracle DB, etc) was straight forward and easy to follow and the XSL for skinning was equally as easy. Any little quirks, idiosyncrasies or bugs we found with either uPortal or other systems were quickly sorted with the help of the uPortal community. One particularly challenging operation was the integration of uPortal with a container managed pooled JNDI datasource rather than the default application managed datasource. Eric Dalquist helped us out with this one from the uPortal side of things quite quickly while we struggled with Oracle's datasource factory class on the container side of things. We eventually got is sorted by ditching Oracle's datasource factory class and instead used Apache's datasource factory class. I contributed my findings to the uPortal 3 wiki while Eric's code additions are now part of the uPortal 3 distribution. Also, I hadn't used Maven before, so dealing with a very much Maven based build procedure was a steep learning curve.

Q. Do you have any words of wisdom that might be helpful to colleagues who are planning to do a uPortal 3 upgrade?

A. Get familiar early with:

  • The new directory structure of the uPortal source and understand why it is this way
  • Searching the community archives (most of your questions will have already been answered before)
  • uPortal 3 wiki (should be a lot more up-to-date now than when I started)

Q. On a more personal level, could you tell us something about what it's like to live in Armidale? What do developers do for fun? (smile)

A. Armidale is a great place to live and offers so much outside of work hours. At about 1000m above sea level, we have cold winters with occasional snow through to warm summers with frequent afternoon thunderstorms. The altitude coupled with the relatively short distance from the east coast (~130km direct), means there is some very steep terrain nearby including some spectacular gorges and scenery which lends itself to a huge array of activities. Some of the things we developers get up to in these areas include canyoning, mountainbiking, kayaking, bushwalking, rock-climbing, fly-fishing and caving. Everyone on our development team is into sports ranging from paragliding, AFL, soccer to rugby league. My wife and I live on a 5 acre block about 30km from Armidale where I am building our house on the weekends. I play squash twice a week and like getting outdoors on the weekends when I want a break from building.

5 Job Postings

5.1 Sakai Foundation - Quality Assurance Director

The Sakai Foundation is looking for a Quality Assurance Director. For further information on this opportunity, see the LinkIn posting below: http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=602902&trk=

5.2 Kuali Foundation - Quality Assurance Director and Member Liaison

The Kuali Foundation has two job openings, one for a Quality Assurance Director and another for a Member Liaison, details of which can be found at the following links.

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JA-SIG Newsletter - September 2008

Archives available in the JA-SIG wiki at: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/Newsletter

If your institution or company has items of interest to the JA-SIG membership, please submit them via email to newsletter at ja-sig dot org.

A special thanks to Chris Doyle, Jim Helwig, Jonathan Markow, and Andrew Petro for assistance and advice on this issue.

The next JA-SIG Newsletter will be published on or about October 15th, 2008. Articles for that edition of the newsletter should be submitted no later than Tuesday, October 14th, 2008. Thanks!

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