sooo... next steps
jayshao
either uPortal, or existing projects... ummm... what's next?
Thoughts:
- should leading candidates (SSO, Survey, etc) be identified, and
separated out into separate projects, apart from the whole Toro lump?
- Are there any projects that Unicon is interested in continuing
development for, and wants to ride point on?
- Why do you have to join the group to post?
- Releases? Are there binary releases for the portlets? Where would
releases go?
- Advertising: how do these projects get gathered together with other
JA-SIG/uPortal compat projects?
-- Freshmeat? Listing on uportal.org?
Andrew?
--Jason
John A. Lewis
Thank you for you good thoughts and questions. We are very excited
that we finally have all the code out in the open! Since we are still
near the beginning of this process, there is plenty to still work out.
Just to attempt to address some of the points you raise (and many of
them deserve plenty of further discussion):
In terms of factoring out individual portlets/channels into their own
deployable projects, I think that's a place where we have to look for
the right balance. We've taken the easy road at this point and kept
them in fairly large bundles of code -- five projects to be be
specific. The reasons for this are as follows: The code in toro-sdk
is a bunch of general use code that we need in the channels, the
portlets, the IPAC server, etc. So unless we were going to put all of
the code into a single project, this clearly needed to be factored
out. Ditto for the toro-resource-pool project -- I'll let someone
like Nick explain why these two are separate from each other. We then
looked at the actual portlets and channels that we had in Academus and
saw that they fell into two large groups, namely the portlets and the
channels. But they fall into these two groups in more than just their
deployment model under uPortal. Each one has a great deal of shared
code and services across the channels/portlets. Unless we were going
to factor out each logical unit of shared code into its own project/
module/jar/whatever, it was going to be difficult to separate out the
channels and portlets into more than two projects and avoid duplicate
code. So instead of 40+ channel/portlet projects, we've gone with
two. Of course from a deployment perspective, you can still just
publish the channels and portlets that interest you, just like we
always did in an Academus deployment. Just forget that the others are
there (unless you later decide you want those too). Lastly, the IPAC
project runs as an independent service to load data into GAP, so it
certainly makes sense as its own project.
Unicon is interested in continuing to develop any and all of the Toro
technologies. We want the interest of the general uPortal community
and of our Cooperative Support subscribers to guide us on where that
development should go. In addition to the more formal mechanisms for
our subscribers, we also hope this mailing list will provide a forum
for discussion about these projects where we can gain some valuable
insight on priorities. Of course, anyone else in the community
interested in working on some aspect of these projects is also welcome
to participate.
The list was set of members-only posting to cut down on any potential
spam on the list. I've modified the setting for now so that anyone
can post, but that messages from non-members will be moderated. We'll
see how it goes and loosen/tighten the restrictions as appropriate.
There will be binary release and source code releases posted as
downloads for the various projects. We just haven't gotten to that
point point while we are still refining the build process for these
projects. Previously these were built as part of a monolithic
Academus build along with uPortal itself. Nick, Andrew, Drew, and
others can comment more directly on the state of the build process and
when releases should start to appear.
Not sure what you are looking for in terms of advertising. We
certainly want anyone who is interested in these projects to know
about them and we are working on some more summary-level information
that will be available on our web site shortly. Unicon will also be
doing some limited publicity work around the availability of these
projects over the next few weeks. Are there other specific things you
had in mind?
We'd love to get things listed on uPortal.org in whatever fashion is
most appropriate. Suggestions? When we have a press release / news
item drafted, I'm sure that would be a great thing to put on ja-
sig.org / uportal.org.
I've started the Freshmeat entry, Hopefully it will be verified and
available soon.
Thanks again!
John