Unconference topics

[Eric Dalquist]

I just wanted to share a topic idea I'm hoping to chat with people about 
at the Unconference this fall and perhaps work on during the developer 
meeting time at the end of the week. There may be more emails like this 
coming as people suggest other ideas. I'd encourage others to do the 
same and get some seeds going on the lists that can translate into good 
topics in Madison in October.

- Using Spring Web Flow 2 for Administrative UIs
    As the world moves toward portlets and features are added or 
re-worked in uPortal 3 we need to find a replacement for IChannel and 
the related Servant APIs that will allow us to use existing MVC 
frameworks. After some discussion among the uPortal developers Spring 
WebFlow 2 was chosen as a likely successor to these technologies as it 
allowed for more standard portlet API based development but also 
provided the View and Controller re-use that the IChannel Servant API 
gave us. An example of this is the Identity and Attribute swapper 
utilities that will be included in uPortal 3.1 These share a common 
'Person Lookup' flow which contains both the view and controller logic 
and can be treated much like an API call by both portlets that use the 
results for either identity or attribute swapping.

    The goal of using Spring WebFlow is to provide a library of discrete 
user interfaces that can easily be used by any other administrative tool 
within the uPortal framework. To that end we plan on having session that 
review in more detail the actually implementation of the flows in 
uPortal 3.1, the pros and cons of using WebFlow and what the next 
administrative UIs to be targeted should be. Also during the following 
developers meeting days we will actually be working on implementing 
flows for anyone that has an interested in becoming familiar with using 
WebFlow in a portlet.

-Eric

For more information about the Unconference:
http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JCON/Fall+2008+Unconference+Madison
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