uPortal 2 Status Andrew Petro, Yale Bill Thompson, Rutgers
9/19/052 Software Maintenance and Evolution “The majority of development … takes place after the software has seen its first release … is known as software maintenance (or software evolution)” Special Issue on Software Maintenance and Evolution, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, October 2005
9/19/053 uPortal release process Patch releases (frequent, no APIs change, uPortal 2.4.4) Minor evolutionary releases (periodic, some APIs change where needed, uPortal 2.6) Major revolutionary releases (rare, huge, uPortal 3)
9/19/054 Kinds of releases Milestone: just a build. Provide a way to talk about and see progress, a goal. Release candidate: A build for QA and review working towards a GA release. GA release: “General audience” or “General availability” releases – a “final” release intended for deployers.
uPortal 2.4.x Patches
9/19/056 uPortal 2.4.x strategy The 2.4.x release strategy has been to: fix reported issues increase portal performance and stability share fixes/optimizations with later release branches incorporate important fixes/optimizations from later releases
9/19/ x releases August 2005: uPortal Memory and performance October 2005: uPortal Security release to fix “CWebProxy proxies too much” issue. Expected December: Bug fixes, JDK 1.5 support
9/19/058 What’s in a release?
uPortal 2.5.x Patches
9/19/0510 uP 2.5.x releases uPortal October 2005 CWebProxy security fix Dynamic channel titles Expected in December: uPortal Bugfixes and release process engineering
9/19/0511 Dynamic channel titles Modest feature An example of evolving the codebase
9/19/0512 Pluggable stats recorder Enable use case of multiple stats recorders in use concurrently
9/19/0513 Bugs – and their resolution WSRP consumption doesn’t work in 2.5 But until Sakai 2.1.0, what WSRP did you really want to consume? Some JSR-168 support problems Making this more concrete Patching
CWebProxy security fix In uPortal and 2.5.1
9/19/0515 Proxying too much Exploit allowed the Adversary to proxy arbitrary files on the portal filesystem as the Tomcat user, e.g. your uPortal configuration files including database passwords.
9/19/0516 The fix Restrict what paths can be set at runtime.
9/19/0517 On Reporting Security Exploits uPortal is an opensource project. Our strength is, we thrive on, open communication, sharing But security exploits are special: Let’s not share them until they’re fixed. In progress: new reporting process
uPortal 2.6 Evolution
9/19/0519 DLM enhancements uPortal 2.5 welcomed DLM into baseline uPortal uPortal 2.6 will include enhancements to DLM in the way managed fragments are managed
9/19/0520 Fine grained permission grants Delegating permission to publish channels to a subset of portal users.
9/19/0521
9/19/0522 When will uPortal 2.6 be released? When it’s ready When the uPortal developers (sufficiently) agree that it’s time to release a new minor release Prediction: Spring ‘06.
The on-going community process “Community” means us.
9/19/0524 Many ways to contribute Many thanks to Vincent Mathieu for stepping up to produce quickstarts.
9/19/0525 Lather, Rinse, Repeat: The patch/release march Continue to incrementally improve uPortal 2.x so long as there’s interest and resources.
9/19/0526 Many deployers of uP 2.x
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9/19/0528 Use cases
9/19/0529 JIRA issue tracker Bugfixes, new features, enhancements Patches Screenshots Scheduling
9/19/0530 Evolving supporting infrastructure
9/19/0531 Patches are a wonderful thing Concrete, specific, technical, unambiguous
9/19/0532 Evolution Our Release Process accommodates evolutionary change for minor releases. Some of these requirements therefore can be realized for uP 2.6, in 2-5 and 2-4 patches. There are important opportunities here.
9/19/0533 Revolution What are the killer features that make a major, revolutionary upgrade worth it? A “no brainer” upgrade?
9/19/0534 Sustainability Direct Stakeholder Involvement Funded Contributions Commercial Partners