JASIG Jun 2007 - Lalit Jairath and Gerrit Bos Table of Contents 1.University of Guelph background 2.Portal Project background 3.Campus News challenges.

JASIG Jun 2007 - Lalit Jairath and Gerrit Bos

Table of Contents

1. University of Guelph background2. Portal Project background3. Campus News challenges4. Technical Overview

• Picklist to Aggregation• Issues and Problems• Solutions• Future Enhancements

5. Live Demo 6. Your turn


University of Guelph

• Mid-size Comprehensive University• ~18,000 students, ~3000 staff/faculty• ~ 1 hour southwest of Toronto• In top 3 since 1997, #1 in 2006• ~1000 Acre Main campus• Satellite colleges across Ontario• 150 year history, University in 1964• Life Sciences + Agriculture + Vet +


IT Structure

• Mixed Central/Decentralized• CCS and Library report to CIO• Infrastructure central

– Email, Web Hosting, Networking, RESnet, Help Centre, Data Centre

• Mostly Local Departmental Support


Portal Project History

• First Portal thoughts in 2002• Two-stage RFP• RFP selected Unicon

Academus• First formal release Sept 2006• Full campus audience• No exclusive content as yet• Moving to uPortal 2.5.3 now


Campus News challenges

• Enhanced Rome portlet (picklist)

• Picklist solution not ideal– Only default feed gets eyeballs– Must browse to see news– Minimal customization– Not all feeds compatible

• Unresponsive feeds an issue• There is a lot of news• There is little news

(sometimes)



• Desire for News-at-a-Glance– Editorialized campus news– Numerous departmental feeds– Personal feeds of interest

• Client preferences split– Chronological “River” of news– Browse “Newspaper” style

• Configured vs. Customizable• All feed technologies

supported



• Sooo…..We want it all– All the news that’s fit to

aggregate– At-a-Glance: News and No

News– Accommodate people’s

preferences– Doesn’t slow page loads– Intuitively usable– Scales well– Has to “Look Good”


How do we get it all?

• Project Planning – the team’s the thing!

• University of Guelph’s needs– User Interface equal to

competition• JSR-168 compliant


Technical Overview

•Picklist to Aggregation

• Issues and Problems

•Solutions

•Future Enhancements


First news reader solution

• uPortal RSS Portlet issues– RSS formats– New standardizations (Atom)

• Other solutions – RSS Reader Apps– RSS Owl, Google, Microsoft®– Not open, Not Java, Non-

standard


Alternatives

Some other projects underway• Jakarta Feed Parser• Rome Portlet• …For our purposes Rome Portlet

wins:"...ending syndication feed confusion

by supporting all of 'em. " Simon Phipps


Rome Portlet Advantages

• Parses, generates and converts popular RSS and ATOM formats: – RSS 0.90 – RSS 0.91 (Netscape and Userland )– RSS 0.92, RSS 0.93, RSS 0.94 – RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0– Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0

• Publish Atom protocol and MetaWeblog API


Picklist Solution: Rome Portlet


Rome Portlet Value-Adds

• Display Feed Title• Role-based feeds• Mandatory feeds• GUI cleaned up


Issues & Problems - Portal Hang

• Portal Hang: Unresponsive feed

• Java.net package JDK 1.4• uPortal 2.4 bug• Apache HttpClient

– setConnectionTimeOut(2000);– setReadTimeOut(2000);

• AND still no aggregation


Aggregation

Some other solutions:• Java RSS• McLaren• Universal RSS channel (UVIC)

• BUT no true aggregation and only limited customization, so we’re sticking with Rome

http://objectlabkit.sourceforge.net/press/homepage-javarss.pdf

http://cse-mjmcl.cse.bris.ac.uk/feedAggregator/


Aggregation: Rome Portlet

Rome Aggregator Components

1. Rome API2. Rome Feed Fetcher3. EhCache


public SyndFeed getFeed(SettingsBean bean) throws IOException, FeedException {

return aggregateFeed(bean, bean.getSelectedFeed()));

//return getFeed(bean, bean.getSelectedFeed());}

Issues & Problems - Aggregation


Once again:

“Most of the problems in

Software Engineering can be

solved by using Indirection!”

Aggregation: Aha!


• Convert any RSS/Atom feed type to an RSS/Atom feed of the specified type.

URL feedUrl = new URL(args[1]);

SyndFeedInput input = new SyndFeedInput();

SyndFeed feed = input.build(new XmlReader(feedUrl));

feed.setFeedType(outputType); SyndFeedOutput output = new SyndFeedOutput();

output.output(feed,new PrintWriter(System.out));

Aggregation: Details


FeedAggregator aggregates multiple feeds

List entries = new ArrayList();feed.setEntries(entries);for (int i=1;i<args.length;i++) { URL inputUrl = new URL(feedURL[i]); SyndFeedInput input = new SyndFeedInput();

SyndFeed inFeed = input.build(new XmlReader(inputUrl));

entries.addAll(inFeed.getEntries());}

Aggregation: Details


• Rome Fetcher – supports HTTP conditional gets (i.e. last modified and ETag handling) and GZip encoded feeds

public SyndFeed getFeed(SettingsBean bean,String selectedFeed) {SyndFeed feed = null; try { feed = fetcher.retrieveFeed(new

URL(selectedFeed)); }}

Issues & Problems - Caching


• Prefetch via wget in Cron

01 * * * * wget –output document=/portal/rss/ccsnews.xml -p --timeout=5 http://blogs.uoguelph.ca/ccsnews/blog/default/?flavor=atom

Issues & Problems - Caching


Demo


"I have now deployed your Rome Portlet into our dev portal (WindowsXP / MySQL 4.1) and on a test portal (Solaris 9 /Oracle 9i).

I haven't really explored the pushing of feeds based on roles,

but that is exactly the kind of functionality we were looking for.

The mandatory feeds are a neat feature as well, the portlet looksgood when it's dropped straight in without fiddling around with css etc and editing/removing feeds works a treat on both platforms.

We'll be adding the portlet to our Pilot Portal soon - it'll be a vast improvement to our current solution and I'd definitely recommend

for it to be bundled in future uPortal packages."

London MetropolitanCheers,Sandra

Reactions


I was able to install your portlet cleanly on our development portal (Academus 2.0, based on uPortal 2.4.x). It runs the default configuration very nicely -- What I've seen so far, though, looks really nice. I think our users will really enjoy it.

Le Tourneau

Reactions


Where Do We Go From Here?

• Ajax Enabled – Proxy • OPML support – Rome Nano• More robust handling of

dates– Created, Modified, Published

• Still more intuitive and usable

• Think about “News Ecosystem”


• Clearing House Download• Email Lalit Jairath

[email protected]• How many people would like

to have this bundled in uPortal 2.6/2.7/3.0 ?

•Questions/Discussion

Opportunities – Your turn

http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/Clearinghouse+Contributions

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

JASIG Jun 2007 - Lalit Jairath and Gerrit Bos Table of Contents 1.University of Guelph background 2.Portal Project background 3.Campus News challenges.

Documents

lalit jairath

gerrit bosalternativessome

gerrit boshow

gerrit bospicklist solution

popular rss

userland rss

news thats

little news sometimesjasig