mbarsic’s blog

The first session of the day was “Designing Future State Architecture.” This was very different than what I expected, but it was a great session. It was geared toward management. I’ll try to summarize it to a few key points, but you may want to find the session and listen to it. It was about more than just technology. They talked about linking the services your institution offers, with the business process that support those services to the resources to the infrastructure. Before you really get started, you need to inventory what you have, and what it’s capable of doing. Then you use the inventory along with services you want to offer to develop your future state, or where you want to go. You revise and adjust it as you progress.

I asked for suggestions of schools that do this and of course they brought up MIT – http://web.mit.edu/itag/.

The next session I went to was “Load Testing the UDC.” When we get a QA person in, this would be good to review. Basically, the presenter covered a lot of topics that we discovered while load testing our Luminis 4 implementation with JMeter – virtual users, mock data, ramp up time. She did mention Banner API scripts for loading test that we should look for. They should be on the SGHE support site.

Finally, I gave my presentation, Luminis as a Java Web Application.

Anita and I kicked off the day with our Managing Banner Security presentation. This was fun. We thought we were in a nice 150 person room, but no, they moved our session to a 400 seat auditorium. It went well and we had plenty of questions at the end of it. Next, I stopped in the exhibitor hall and I had a couple people from our session stop me and ask questions there.

I attended Erin’s “Shake the Roots: Portal revamp in 5 steps” session. I went just in case of technical questions. Erin described our portal upgrade and redesign. She did a fantastic job. I only needed to help with one question about our strange e-mail configuration. I got comments from a few schools about how good her presentation was.

Next, I went to “UDC User Interface Roadmap.” SGHE is focusing on creating a better user experience and better navigation. They’re also trying to make their products appear more “unified.” This is involving a switch to Flex in some areas and/or the use of AJAX in others. They are also trying to make better use of CSS to make the existing SSB pages fit in more. The presenter suggested getting familiar with Eclipse/Flex Builder and perhaps Eclipse/Aptana for AJAX development.

Finally, I went to The Future Banner Architecture. This covered some of that same territory at the UDC technical opening session but more in depth. A few concepts that they’re focusing on are SOA, configuration and extensibility. They developing with a model-driven-architecture implemented with Spring/Hibernate/JPA. He talked about some of the development benefits SGHE is getting from this, such as design-by-contract and the use of mock objects. They are also working to consolidate business rules and making it easier to manage and modify them – this fits in well the “configure-over-program” methodology. I’m liking what I’ve heard. They’re sounding more like the Pragmatic Programmers, which should be a good thing.

UDC Architecture and SOA

I was a little bored by this session as the presented focused in on some topics that I’m already aware of.  Plus he went into the PL/SQL APIs to WebServices (which we’ve a done a POC with Oracle tools a couple years ago).  He did recommend a book I’ll look into “SOA Patterns.”

PCI Implementation

This was a great session since Banner is dropping payment support.  It was a little scary too.  It talked about PCI compliance and how the new rules are affecting colleges. I picked up a lot of interesting bits – e.g., compliance is by institution (not merchant), don’t keep cardholder data (on the Web side we don’t), new rule that “vulnerable” applications should be desupported on 10/1/2009 (ouch!).

Basically, this should be a finance driven project process with assistance from IT.   The presenter specifically said that “validation is at a point in time” and things change everyday.  Here’s his blueprint:

1. CFO/VP level sponsorship
2. Finance/IT Team
3. Limit PCI scope
4. Train and Communicate
5. Create a breach response plan, e.g. two institution types – those who have had CC breaches and those that will have breaches.

I spoke with Michelle after this session for about a half hour – we should start looking at this very soon.

The rest of the day I spent working on my presentation and cleaning up some work issues.  I also spoke with Ted S.  a little bit and picked up some interesting ideas from him.

Luminis Platform 5 Architecture

The presenter went through this in a lot more detail, but let me give you the key thinsgs.

1. Java 1.6 (they are trying to stay with an up-to-date Java now)
2. Tomcat is the app server
3. All implementation will be parallel deployment even if they only have one node.  They’re using the TerraCotta project to keep JVMs in sync.
4. The administration will be done on a standalone Web App and will use flex components instead of HTML.
5. Configuration will take advantage of JMX and that couple with TerraCotte will allow for configuration changes without restarts.
6. The platform will be using the following libraries Spring, Hibernate, Apache CXF, Jackrabbit (a lightweight CMS).  They’ve been testing with MySQL and Hypersonic in addition to Oracle because of the use the Hibernate ORM library and JPA.
7. Channel development will need to be JSR 168/286 – no more uPortal style Java channels.
8. Channels will also make use of RESTful Web Services coupled with Flex or AJAX – and we already know how to do this.
9. Liferay is the underlying portal structure.
10. CAS will be the baseline authentication.
11. CPIP will be deprecated but GCF is not.
12. GA release is targeted for early 2010.

There’s more I could write about this one, but that’s enough for now.

Using Google Analytics with Luminis

Looks nice and easy to do.  We should probably start doing this in the real MySCAD in preparation for the PSP.  We’d need to sign up for an account and add some JavaScript to the nested-tables.xsl file.   This college used filters to identify the active tab and produce a little more meaningful stats.  The active tab is available through a query string attribute called “activeTab”  We just need to map the activeTab code to meaningful string and write a regular expression in a Google Analytics filter.

Luminis Platform 5 Architecture

This will be a major change.  It looks like uPortal is gone and replaced with the Liferay portal framework.   On the plus side, they’re using RESTful Web Services and Flex/AJAX as a way to develop channels .  I’ll post more about this later…

The opening session was interesting.  The new CEO definitely wants to shake things up.  On the good side, he wants SGHE to start acting like one company, which make a lot of sense.  On the scary side, he seems to want to release more things, faster – that can be taxing for us unless they do things very well.  Maya Angelou was very good too.  I’m glad I got to hear her speak.

Next, I went to the UDC Technical Opening session.  This was an interesting session.  They appear to be moving to a Java mid-tier with an RIA client (Flex or AJAX) for many things.  With the Java-tier they mentioned the Spring library and Hibernate for object-relational mapping.  This is very flexible architecture, but they are signalling a shift from Oracle – I think- if you use an ORM you should be able to choose your own database.  For ID management, they’re using SPML and mentioned extending CAS.  The Luminis 5 preview mentioned some good improvements, plus a shift away from uPortal.  We should start looking at true Portlet/JSR-168 development for channels.   Here are some othe keywords that came up – Apache CXF, TerraCotta (for caching) and JackRabbit as a simple CMS.  Also, Luminis 5 is sticking with Tomcat which is fine for me.  For UI development, they basically said start ramping up your Flex skills as well as straight HTML/CSS.   They also said to get familiar with Eclipse as well as Flex Builder (which is built on Eclipse or can be installed as a plugin) and possibly Aptana – which is also available as standalone or an Eclipse plugin.

To cap off the day, Anita, Erin, Joanne and I met with Mark Zimmerman, LInda Jessup and Melissa King to discuss EM.  I also told Melissa that we’d love to start helping with a dev kit – either beta or pre-release.  Erin and I spoke with some people from Univeristy of San Diego and Sherri Z. from Lehigh.

Here’s a quick and dirty example of adding a Virtual host to OAS 10.1.3x, since you need to so this with files.

You’ll need to edit the $ORACLE_HOME/Apache/Apache/httpd.conf file. I looked for the existing VirtualHosts section, which may be commented out. Then added the following:


Listen 7890
<VirtualHost *:7890>
ServerName em-tst.scad.edu
DocumentRoot "/u00/websites/em-tst/htdocs"
LogLevel error
DirectoryIndex index.html
CustomLog "|/u00/app/oracle/product/oas10134/Apache/Apache/bin/rotatelogs /u00/app/oracle/product/oas10134/Apache/Apache/logs/access_rar_log 43200" combined
ErrorLog "|/u00/app/oracle/product/oas10134/Apache/Apache/bin/rotatelogs /u00/app/oracle/product/oas10134/Apache/Apache/logs/error_rar_log 43200"
ServerAdmin somone@scad.edu
</VirtualHost>


After that, you can check your config with

$ORACLE_HOME/Apache/Apache/bin/apachectl configtest

If you did it right, you should get “Syntax OK” and you’ll probably see a warning about direct use of apachectl is deprecated, but we’re just checking the syntax.

Finally restart Apache with opmnctl or via the Enterprise Manager.