Hi Ate
Thanks for the thoughtful and considered reply.
Yes, I would like to help, but not quite yet. I am full time employed
writing portlet software, and I am intending to sit part 1 of the Sun SCEA 5
exam in a couple of weeks. Assuming I pass that (a big assumption), the part
2 project component is going to chew up quite a bit of my spare time.
I'm pleased to see that the Jetspeed LDAP integration is going to be
improved. I tried the existing connection, and it seemed to be a very
minimal facility. I couldn't make it return a custom LDAP property into the
Jetspeed preferences. (Could just be due to a lack of documentation)
Maybe after you get back from your holiday we can catch up, and I should
have a better idea of my own spare time. I think it is time I gave something
back to the open source community - I have been an avid consumer of their
products for many years. I've had a look at the Jetspeed Java code, and it
looks to be pretty professional .
The timeframe of a JSR286 release next year fits quite well with my
organisation's plans. The IBM release is overdue now, and we will be waiting
for at least SP1 before we adopt it. And there is no time (or money) in the
forseeable future to do the upgrade.
Just a note on how we are developing portlet software. The project I am
leading uses Jetspeed 2.1.3 for development. We write everything in Java 1.5
and weave the classes to 1.4 for both Jetspeed unit testing and WPS
deployment (Would you believe that WPS currently only supports Java 1.4!).
Thanks to JSR 168, the same .war file is deployable on both environments
without modification. I have written a couple of classes to stub out IBM
specific features that we use - notably the clustered machine cache, and put
them into the Jetspeed shared libs directory.
A couple of gripes we still have are:
- We cannot use libraries that require Java 1.5 runtime support.
Unfortnately JAXB is one of these, and we really want to use it. The Java
1.4 version generates many times more classes and interfaces than the Java
1.5 version.
- The IBM portal uses a couple of non-standard JNDI branches
(/services/... and /cells/persistent/...) as well as the usual java:comp/...
branch. I have written a class that makes this transparent, but I would
rather add code to Tomcat to provide these branches. I can't find any info
on how to do this.
Debugging on the IBM portal is close to impossible - 20 minute server
startup time, and it runs like a bag of bolts in debug mode. But debugging
on Jetspeed is a breeze - almost as easy as debugging a normal Tomcat
servlet app (hot deploy is a bit slower).
BTW, my first "contribution" is a possible bug report along with a suggested
fix. See http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JS2-894
You must be in the northern hemisphere. It is mid-winter here in New
Zealand; it is cold and holidays are a distant memory... Enjoy your time in
the sun :)
Regards
Ron
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ate Douma" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Jetspeed Users List" <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2008 1:44 AM
Subject: Re: JSR 286?
Hi Ron,
First of all, you're welcome to contributing *anytime*, regardless :)
Ron McNulty wrote:
Hi All
In the next few months, IBM are going to release Webshere Portal Server,
with JSR 286 support.
As I use Jetspeed for development, and WPS for deployment, I am
interested in what plans the developers have to release a JSR 286
compliant release. If development resources are stretched, I may be
interested in contributing myself.
So developers - where are we at?
Of course we intend to provide a compliant JSR-286 release ASAP.
For that, Jetspeed-2 is going to use Pluto 2.0 as Portlet Container, which
immediately makes clear we're not ready yet.
As you might have followed on the Pluto developers list, we are in the
process of adapting/refactoring Pluto 2.0 such that it (again) is usable
as embedded Portlet Container for Jetspeed-2.
Since the major Pluto SPI changes with their 1.1.0 release, Jetspeed-2 has
no longer been able to upgrade to newer versions of Pluto. But we're about
to remedy this now for, and before, the Pluto 2.0 release.
If you're interested in the work required for that, I suggest reading the
following:
http://www.nabble.com/Embeddable-Pluto-2.0-container-for-Jetspeed-2-td15362174.html
Work for this is in progress in a (temporary) branch:
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/portals/pluto/branches/2.0-spi-refactoring
But... this work has been stalled for a few months(!) now because all the
active committers are too much tied up in customer related projects :(
We do intend to move quickly again though in a few weeks time (note:
several developers, like myself, will be away on holiday shortly) and get
the pluto refactoring branch finished ASAP (after which it will be moved
to/become Pluto trunk again).
Once Pluto 2.0 is embeddable in Jetspeed-2, we're start working on
integrating it right away as we intend to use Pluto 2.0 for the next major
release of Jetspeed, 2.2.
But, we also intend to provide several other major features/improvements
with Jetspeed-2, like a brand new Maven 2 build, complete replacement of
the current Java Preferences usage for Portlet prefs as well as security
prefs with a more "normalized" back-end model, and some hefty (mostly
internal) security model changes to better support hierarchical RBAC and a
more complete (and probably new) LDAP integration.
So, as you can see, there is still very much work ahead before Jetspeed
2.2 will be ready for release, and yes, our development resources *are*
extremely stretched...
But probably most important for you is that (right now) we do *not* yet
intend to provide full JSR-286 support with the next release. Although the
Pluto 2.0 container itself already is JSR-286 compliant, integrating all
the new features
in Jetspeed-2 as well is going to take quite some extra time too.
The current plan is to first get a Jetspeed 2.2 release out of the door
with (at least) the above described features.
Right after that, JSR-286 compliance will be the top (and probably only)
major feature we'll work on ASAP and we'll intend to release a JSR-286
compliant Jetspeed 2.3 quickly after the 2.2 release.
Now, with regards to time scheduling of all this: it really depends on how
much time we (developers) can make free to work on Jetspeed (and Pluto),
and how much time others (like yourself) might be able to help out too.
My current hope is we'll be able to deliver Pluto 2.0 and Jetspeed 2.2 at
least before ApacheConUS beginning of November. If we'll be able to meet
that schedule, I'd expect a JSR-286 compliant Jetspeed 2.3 release to be
possible sometime early next year.
I definitely would like to speed things up a lot more but there is no
point in being unrealistic. Right now, the list of (more or less) active
developers is quite short and everyone has a full time professional job on
the side as well.
So, while my initial comment above was intended with a :), I also was very
serious at the same time.
We really could use (lots of) additional support from the community with
this, so your offer to help out/contribute definitely is very welcome. If
you're serious about it, please let us know the area(s) you might be most
familiar with and/or interested in and we'll try to coordinate to work
together.
FYI: I'll be gone for 3 weeks holiday starting this Saturday, and I know
Dennis Dam will be gone for 4(!) weeks after next week. But, David Taylor
will be arriving back from his 2(!) weeks holiday end of this week, and
you certainly can contact and coordinate with him too.
I hope the above information is not disappointing but has increased your
interest and willingness to contribute!
Looking forward to working together on this.
Regards, Ate
Regards
Ron McNulty
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