uPortal 2 Status

Andrew Petro, YaleBill Thompson, Rutgers

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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

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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)

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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

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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

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2.4.x releases

August 2005: uPortal 2.4.3 Memory and performance

October 2005: uPortal 2.4.3.1 Security release to fix “CWebProxy

proxies too much” issue. Expected December: 2.4.4

Bug fixes, JDK 1.5 support

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What’s in a release?

uPortal 2.5.x

Patches

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uP 2.5.x releases

uPortal 2.5.1 October 2005 CWebProxy security fix Dynamic channel titles

Expected in December: uPortal 2.5.2 Bugfixes and release process

engineering

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Dynamic channel titles

Modest feature An example of evolving the codebase

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Pluggable stats recorder

Enable use case of multiple stats recorders in use concurrently

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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 2.4.3.1 and 2.5.1

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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.

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The fix

Restrict what paths can be set at runtime.

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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

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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

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Fine grained permission grants

Delegating permission to publish channels to a subset of portal users.

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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.

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Many ways to contribute

Many thanks to Vincent Mathieu for stepping up to produce quickstarts.

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Lather, Rinse, Repeat:The patch/release march

Continue to incrementally improve uPortal 2.x so long as there’s interest and resources.

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Many deployers of uP 2.x

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Use cases

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JIRA issue tracker

Bugfixes, new features, enhancements Patches Screenshots

Scheduling

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Evolving supporting infrastructure

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Patches are a wonderful thing

Concrete, specific, technical, unambiguous

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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.

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Revolution

What are the killer features that make a major, revolutionary upgrade worth it? A “no brainer” upgrade?

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Sustainability

Direct Stakeholder Involvement Funded Contributions Commercial Partners