uPortal Areas of Responsibility

Areas of Responsibility

Areas of Responsibility serves two purposes. First, it lists those areas that are under active development in the uPortal project along with the people who have volunteered to manage the area. Second, it is an expanding list of those areas of uPortal that lack a leader and/or team of developers.

If there is an area for which you would like to contribute leadership or development, click on volunteer link for that area. Any help will be greatly appreciated!

Responsibility	Description	Developer(s) (Leaders in bold)
Framework
Address Book	Interfaces and reference implementation for address book functionality. This will initially be used by the CIMAPMail channel, but will service as a service for all channels.	Vikrant Joshi, University of British Columbia [Volunteer]
Administration	User interfaces for managing users, layouts, channels, roles, etc.	[Volunteer]
Aesthetics	Controlling the look and feel and usability of the uPortal reference implementation. This includes testing that the reference implementation is ADA-compliant.	Justin Tilton, IM&M [Volunteer]
Authentication	Providing a flexible framework for implementing authentication and facilitating single-sign-on.	Shawn Bayern, Yale University [Volunteer]
Authorization	Providing a flexible framework for implementing authorization (roles).	[Volunteer]
Caching service	When channels request remote content, we need a service that caches that content locally, either in memory, on disk, or a combination of both. This service will initially be used for caching XML documents (e.g. RSS) and images. Consideration must be given to appropriate refresh frequencies for each resource.	[Volunteer]
Channel contract	Responsible for the design of the IChannel interface.	Peter Kharchenko, IBS [Volunteer]
Code Auditor	Enforcing good coding practices such as proper logging, proper exception management, use of JavaDoc, readable code format	Zed Shaw, University of British Columbia [Volunteer]
Compatibility	Testing to make sure uPortal runs effectively on all major operating systems and browsers.	Justin Tilton, IM&M [Volunteer]
Database	Ensuring that uPortal works with all relational databases for which there is a JDBC driver available. This includes maintaining database scripts and approving database tables, column names, tables names, and data types.	Doug Loewen, University of British Columbia Ken Weiner, IBS [Volunteer]
Documentation	Responsible for organizing all of the uPortal documentation. This includes the website, FAQs, specifications, development guides, etc. The documentation and website will be kept in the uPortal CVS repository.	Bill Brooks, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Michael Barton, Princeton University Paul Zabloski, University of British Columbia Michael Oltz, Cornell University [Volunteer]
Exception handling	Ensuring that java exceptions are thrown and caught appropriately throughout uPortal code. This includes the design and use of portal-specific exceptions derived from java.lang.Exception.	Michael Barton, Princeton University [Volunteer]
Logging	Designing and maintaining an ILogger interface to be implemented against different loggers. An initial implementation could be Apache's log4j. The log output should be xml format so XSLT could be used to easily view and/or filter log content. Developers responsible for logging should also review code on a regular basis to ensure that log statements have been inserted in a consistent manner. For example, there should always be a log statement with log level DEBUG before every SQL statement issued by the framework.	[Volunteer]
Properties	Overseeing the use of uPortal properties files. There are currently several properties files in uPortal, and we'd like to consider combining these into a single properties file in XML format.	[Volunteer]
Publish/Subscribe	User interfaces for publishing and subscribing to channels. A mechanism is needed for associating keywords with channels so they can be located via a keywork search.	John Laker, University of Delaware Debra Rundle, Princeton University [Volunteer]
Rendering	Rendering via XSL transformations.	Peter Kharchenko, IBS [Volunteer]
Web Proxying	Integration of external web applications	Andrew Draskoy, Memorial University of Newfoundland [Volunteer]
Kerberos Security Context	A uPortal SecurityContext written to handle Kerberos authentication.	[Volunteer]
Content
Announcements	* Thought is that the announcements channel would really just be an RSS 1.0 feed formatted as announcements and using some of the Dublin Core tags to indicate important attributes. Perhaps an announcements DTD based on a subset of rss 1.0. * Consideration to the design for hooking into institutions existing announcements system as the back end. * Authorization system will be built in to the announcements channel to deliver role specific announcements. * Authorized users should also be able to add announcements through the channel's interface.	Susan Bramhall, Yale University [Volunteer]
Bookmarks	Need to improve existing Bookmarks channel to allow folders/tree of bookmarks and an improved user interface.	[Volunteer]
Calendar	Calendar channel	Susan Bramhall, Yale University [Volunteer]
RSS 1.0 Channel	Enhanced RSS 1.0 Channel including ability to hide descriptions, see top 5-6 items.	Susan Bramhall, Yale University [Volunteer]
Chat	Instant messaging and chat room functionality. It has been suggested that instant communication in uPortal be implemented with the open-source, XML Jabber protocol.	[Volunteer]
Help Channel	This channel will provide a centralized interface to access channel help information.	[Volunteer]
XML Editor Channel	This channel will build an XML editor interface dynamically based on a supplied DTD. This could be used to create and RSS editor if the channel were given the RSS DTD.	Katya Sadovsky, UC Irvine [Volunteer]
Newsgroups	Newsgroup (sometimes called Forums) channel that will use NNTP to allow for Deja-News-style message boards.	IBS [Volunteer]

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