The Jasig Spring 2010 Conference promises several days full of stimulating presentations but wait, there's more! There will also be a number of Fun Activities that you can choose to participate in. There is a Fun Activities page on the conference wiki where you can find more information. If you have another fun idea, please feel free to post it there as well! I do want to highlight a few in particular.

Sunday you are probably attending a pre-conference seminar (it's not too late to sign up for one) but don't use up all your brain power. During the Sunday evening poolside reception, we will be hosting the First Annual Jasig Pub Trivia Competition! This promises to be a lively team event complete with prizes. Teams of about four people will work in groups to try to answer as many trivia questions as possible during each timed round. Questions will be drawn from a broad and varied field of subjects so it is in your best interest to have broad and varied team membership. While spectators are welcome, we wholeheartedly encourage you to gather a few of your fellow attendees and form a team. If you are new to the community, this will be a great way to jump in and make new friends! Oh, and don't forget, no cheating with your iPhone or Blackberry - and the Quizmaster is always right!

Tuesday evening you can choose to enjoy dinner as part of the Dine Around. You can visit the wiki page for more information on how you can sign up to join a small group of your colleagues for "Dutch treat" dinning a a local restaurant. This is a great way to meet new friends over dinner. Talk about what you have learned at the conference, talk about your pet - or simply sit back and listen to the lively conversation while you enjoy a good meal. Just don't forget to pay your bill!

If you are looking for something more physical (or need to burn off calories from the Dine Around), be sure to check out the biking, running, surfing, hiking and kayaking information on the Fun Activities page. If you are interested in participating with others in your adventure, feel free to use that wiki page for coordination. The Jasig Running Club is already planning on running as a group Tuesday evening and will likely have a morning run as well.

The weather forecast indicates it should be in the mid-60s Fahrenheit with a chance of showers a few days. A lite jacket will probably be appropriate. You can track this at weather.gov or accuweather.com.

Log into the wiki and sign up to "watch" the Fun Activities page to ensure you stay informed on the latest developments.

See you in San Diego!

Sharing at the Conference

I bet there is something you really want to talk about with others at the Jasig Spring Conference. Maybe you just rolled out a new portal? Developed a cool web application or portlet? Use CAS in an innovative way? Found a new development tool? Are looking for advice on solving a tricky development problem? There are multiple ways to get the word out and it isn't too late to sign up.

Present a Poster/Demo
Monday evening there will be a poster session and reception. We will provide tables and poster board to anyone that wants to present. You can feel free to use your laptop for demos. Attendees will be able to grab some refreshments and peruse the informal posters. You can sign up by following the instructions on the wiki to present any time prior to the conference as long as we still have space.

Give a Lightning Talk
On Tuesday morning at 10:15 one of the presentation rooms will be devoted to lightning talks. As the name implies, these are quick (less than 10 minutes) talks with or without slides on a topic of your choice. These are great ways to quickly introduce something you are interested in and suggest that people follow up with you later. Quick demos would also be applicable. If you have not presented before, giving a lightning talk is a great way to get started. For more information or to sign up, see the wiki.

Attend the Bar Camp
The BarCamp on Wednesday afternoon will be another venue to share information. This is an informal meeting where the agenda is determined by the interests of those attending. This is a great setting to have discussions with other interested parties sharing your interests. For more information, see the BarCamp wiki page.

So it's not too late to sign up to share something with your colleagues! The couple hours you will be spending on the plane can be put to good use writing up a few slides to share or creating pages for a poster. These less-formal venues are a great way to network and collaborate at the conference.

See you in San Diego!

Preparing for a Jasig Conference

The program committee is sometimes asked, "how do I prepare for the upcoming Jasig conference." The reality is, you can't prepare for it. Jasig conferences are usually known for exceeding the expectations of the attendees. With key notes by noted industry heavyweights such as Justin Erenkrantz from the Apache Software Foundation, Rod Johnson from SpringSource, and Gregory Jackson from EDUCAUSE, everyone is sure to find something to keep them riveted. Add to that tons of presentations on open source projects such as CAS, uPortal, Bedework, Kuali, HelpDesk, Spring Security and more, and you're sure to learn something! Pre-Conference and Post-Conference seminars add an extra level of learning to an already full conference. Despite this, there are a few things you can try to do to prepare for the conference:

Read Up on the Projects so you know which presentations to visit (we include descriptions in the program you'll receive)
• Get in shape! The Jasig Running Club is looking for more runners!
• Do some stomach exercises! Jasig Conferences are known for their excellent food choices and dine-around options, not to mention all the camaraderie that happens at the bars!
• Be prepared to learn - Forget all that useless trivia about Saved By the Bell episodes and stop quoting from Disney movies! You'll need that space for the presentations on Groovy, Terracotta, Spring Security, and more!
• Be Prepared to Code - If you're attending the developer days, you can look forward to helping out your favorite Jasig project with some open JIRA issues
• Get All the Extra Sleep You Can - With tons of presentations, new people to meet, ideas to share, and beers to drink (and then run off), there isn't much time for sleeping
• Write Down Any Questions - This is the perfect opportunity to ask your peers for answers to your unanswered questions or to pick the brains of the developers of the projects
• Sign Up to Facilitate a Session - It helps us, which should give you a warm fuzzy feeling.
• Prepare a Lightning Talk - Not ready for a full out hour to present. Give a short presentation that can lead to later discussions.
• Create a Poster - present a poster during the reception.

Not registered for the conference? There's still time to register at the conference web site.

Pre-Conference Seminars for CAS Deployers

The Jasig Spring 2010 Conference is approaching! Luckily, if you haven't registered yet, there's still time to register. Heck, there's even still time to register for the pre-conference seminars. Because its often harder to tell if the pre-conference seminars are right for you, this blog entry focuses solely on the available pre-conference seminars relevant to CAS deployers

User Interface Development with jQuery and Cooking with Fluid Infusion

If you're deploying CAS, its going to be on the top-viewed web applications you've got. It looks pretty right? Not quite? Jazz it up a little bit with some jQuery and Fluid Infusion. The Fluid Project team members are experts in UI, usability and jQuery!

Implementing CAS

Adam Rybicki, a CAS expert, is giving a seminar on implementing CAS. Its perfect for those who are looking to figure out how to use the advanced CAS features and find our manual just a bit lacking in the details they need to really grasp it. New to CAS, Java, and Maven2? Adam can help you sort it out much faster and more easily than stumbling about on your own. Topics covered include the basics, clustering, and single sign out as well as configuring CAS clients.

Laying the Foundation for Your IdM Re-Architecture!

Got CAS successfully deployed? Great! What's next? This is the point where you realize there are a ton of identity management related problems that you need to solve. Where to start? What to do? Experts in IdM can provide you with some guidance and walk you through some of their own issues and problems and how they solved them (or are working on solving them). Its much easier to build on what people have already done than to re-implement the wheel.

In addition to these great seminars, there's a bunch of other CAS related content including CAS roadmap, modifying the CAS web flow, clustering CAS, and more! Register today!

Developer Days @ Jasig Spring 2010 Conference

The Jasig Spring 2010 Conference is fast approaching. With its theme of 10 years of open source innovation, it seems key to focus on what happens after the conference (though really, you should register for the conference, cool stuff happens there!). On the Thursday and Friday after the conference end, developers stick around and do what it is that developers do: code, fix bugs, design and architect in a crazy free-for-all environment with no rules! (okay there are some rules, like don't break anything or hurt anyone).

What Exactly Are Developer Days?

Developer days are:

• An opportunity for those developer's who rarely meet face-to-face to be able to collaborate in person


• An opportunity for non-core developers to work with core developers on JIRA issues, new extension ideas they wish to contribute, etc. (Bug Hunt, etc.)


• An opportunity for interested collaborating parties to work with the development teams


• An opportunity for interested parties to collaborate on a project they may wish to propose as an incubating project.


• An opportunity for the Incubation Committee to meet with incubating project developers?


• An opportunity for Jasig cross-project collaboration (i.e. uPortal and CAS and Mobile UIs)


• An opportunity for non-Jasig cross-project collaboration

Developer days are not:

• a debugging session for someone's problems, unless the development team wishes to spend their time doing that.

Who should attend?

If you're interested in contributing back to a Jasig project, incubating a new project, just seeing what goes into a Jasig project, or integrating with a Jasig project, you could probably benefit from attending the developer days.

How do I let people know what I want to do?

First, you should sign up for the conference. Then you should add what you want to work on to our list of things that are going on during the developer days.

Why Developer Days?

We ask, why not? Jasig is not only about its open source projects, but about fostering collaboration of ideas, knowledge, and projects. Developer Days continue this tradition by encouraging different organizations to work together and learn from each other.

Rod Johnson and the Future of Innovation

Jasig is honored to have Rod Johnson as one of its keynote speakers this year. For years, Rod Johnson has been the voice in the Java enterprise telling us that we can do better! One of the leading authorities on Java and Java EE development, he has led the way to a lighter, more productive development style with his Spring Framework. Spring has grown into an entire portfolio with products as varied as Spring LDAP, Spring Security (which has Jasig CAS integration!), Spring Batch and more. He also founded SpringSource which guides the development of the Spring products, as well as leads the industry. Rod has an impressive resume including a PhD from the University of Sydney, a successful company (SpringSource, now part of VMWare) and a number of influential books including Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development (2002) and J2EE without EJB (July 2004, with Juergen Hoeller).

Just about every Jasig product today utilizes some Spring project. CAS builds on Spring LDAP, Spring Security, and Spring Framework. OpenRegistry, an incubating project, uses Spring Framework, Spring Security, and Spring Batch. uPortal uses Spring Framework and Spring LDAP. Outside of Jasig, projects such as Sakai and Kuali have actively used Spring.

A large number of institutions have adopted Spring as part of the toolset they use to develop applications. Members within the higher education community have even assisted with the development of Spring. Dmitriy Kopylenko from Rutgers University was an early Spring Framework committer. Eric Dalquist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison contributed the pooling functionality to Spring LDAP. Scott Battaglia maintains the CAS integration with Spring Security. John Lewis from Unicon (a Jasig Partner) contributed much to the Spring Portlet support, building on the initial work of Bill Thompson (formerly from Rutgers, now Princeton). I'm sure there are others that I've missed (feel free to leave a comment, and I'll update this page!).

With all this in mind, its obvious to see the importance of Spring, and thus Rod's vision to the future of application development in higher education. Join us on Wednesday, March 10, 2010 for Rod's talk about "Open Source, Cloud Computing, and the Future of Innovation." In addition to Rod's talk, there will be a number of other topics on open source and innovation, including an additional keynote from Justin Erenkrantz (President of the Apache Foundation) and numerous topics on Jasig and other open source projects.

For more information on the Jasig Spring 2010 Conference, check out the web site. You can also view the complete program and register. Its too late for the early-bird registration, but you're still getting quite the bargain at the regular conference price!

Jasig 2010 uPortal Highlights

Are you looking for more information about uPortal? How about some half day training opportunities? Tips and techniques for developing portlets? Information about managing uPortal installations? A chance to hang out with fellow developers and implementors? The 10th Anniversary Jasig Conference in San Diego March 7-10 has all of this and more!
There are half-day seminars on uPortal implementation, migration to uPortal 3, portlet development, uPortal for mobile devices, and using jQuery and Fluid Infusion. In addition, over a dozen sessions will cover portal-related topics including the following:

• Developing with Spring Portlet MVC, Struts, jQuery, Fluid Infusion
• WebServices and portlets
• Content Management, Help Desk,
• Managing uPortal environments
• uPortal Roadmap
• Portal planning

This is a great opportunity to advance your skills and see innovative techniques that others are using. There will be plenty of opportunities to spend face-to-face time with your peers from other universities and take back valuable information you can use in your own portal development.
And if you REGISTER BY FRIDAY you can save $50 on registration and get in on the hotel group rate!
I look forward to escaping these single digit temps (and those are Fahrenheit) and I hope to see you in San Diego!