Grouper Developers Forum

["Jessica Bibbee" <>]

Grouper WG Conference Call
October 4, 2006

*Participants*
Tom Barton, U. Chicago (chair)
Gary Brown, U. Bristol
Joy Veronneau, U. Cornell
Brendan Bellina, USC
R.L. "Bob" Morgan, U. Washington
Mark Weber, U. Wisconsin
Monica Crawford, U. Wisconsin
Chuck Miller, U. Wisconsin
Steve Devoti, U. Wisconsin
Nate Klingenstein, Internet2
Ann West, EDUCAUSE/Internet2
Steve Olshansky, Internet2
Jessica Bibbee, Internet2 (scribe)

Carry-Over *Action Items*
[AI] {Blair} will share his testing results with the Working Group. (6-Sep-06)
[AI] {Stephen and Blair} will speak offline regarding the development of additional interfaces. (6-Sep-06)
[AI] {Tom} will add discussion items to the wiki, and pass the links to the mailing list. (6-Sep-06)
[AI] Please contact {Tom} if you would like to submit a proposal for a track session, etc., for the upcoming Fall 2006 Internet2 Member Meeting. (6-Sep-06)
[AI] {Gary} will speak with Kathryn Huxtable regarding changes for the next v1.1 release. (6-Sep-06)
[AI] {Stephen} will pass along a link to their CVS for a model similar to the Grouper object model, including use cases and code. (6-Sep-06)
[AI] {Tom} will work with {SteveO} to create higher-level screenshots. (12-Jul-06)

*Agenda*
1. sources of slowness & remedies
  . jndi source adapter connection pooling
  . cache settings
  . UI pagination strategy
  . XML import strategy
  . other?
2. release 1.1 status
3. sig-gro ldap provisioning connector
4. public referendum

*Discussion*
The following two events are of interest to the Grouper Working Group:
.CAMP: Building a Distributed Access Management Infrastructure – 7-9 Nov., Denver, CO.
<http://www.educause.edu/CAMP064>.
.Fall 2006 Internet2 Member Meeting December 4-7, Chicago, IL.
<http://events.internet2.edu/2006/fall-mm/index.html>

The Group reviewed several issues raised as more people begin to work with Grouper. {Tom} thanked {Mark} for contributing a connection pooling patch for the JNDI Source Adapter and suggested the patch be available in CVS, as well as in the next release for Signet and Grouper. {Tom} asked the Group if there was a noticeable performance improvement with the use of the patch, but no one has yet measured it.

There is caching in the Grouper API, and there has been substantial changes to the ehcache config file where it used to be large long-lived values. There will be other improvements as performance feedback dictates.

The group also addressed UI pagination strategies, which {Gary and Blair} will work together on. {Gary} would like to make the API less heavy in retrieving desired values. {Monica} suggested a useful text search within a result set so as not to wade through each page. The API currently does not offer this capability, as instantiating every object introduces display time inefficiencies.

{Gary} emphasized that it should be the database that works to perform a query that produces a reduced result set, as opposed to retrieving all memberships and furthermore filtering. Given that each campus will have a different Subject schema, provisioning subjects in the group registry is a necessary step. There are also advantages in having the database sort the results via a given field.

{Tom} asked the Early Adopters if they would want to provision all people into the groups registry for facilitating groups management. {Steve} indicated it would mean a replication of data, while {Mark} said it would mean more machinery that would have to manage data elsewhere. However, they might be able to look at performance numbers to see if it is something that would help or not.

The XML importer currently treats a refresh in the same way it would import and replace. The incremental update strategy is on {Blair's} to-do list.

The anticipated release of Grouper v1.1 is scheduled in preparation for the upcoming CAMP in early November. It will primarily be a maintenance release with additional query filters. The only functional enhancement for the API includes a change of the configuration files from using dynamic to static methods. {Joy's} request for the capability to load a list of subject IDs will be considered for a subsequent release.

Also arriving in time for the November CAMP, will be the LDAP provisioning connector. {Tom} provided an update on its progress, saying there are two developers working full-time to have a v0.5 ready by November. {Tom} reviewed some of the previously mentioned provisioning requests or concerns, such as provisioning groups and reflecting that into LDAP. An area of possible extension is to provision multiple memberships' attributes, as the base type for this particular provisioning connector has one member list.

{Joy} asked the Group if they had significant reasons to use web services vs. LDAP for querying. {Bob} commented that the management aspect of web services is not something to overlook. {Tom} shared that U. Chicago has some clear instances where information is best presented in LDAP, due to the nature of downstream technology, while other instances are better suited for web services, where management of the group registry is important.

The next scheduled Grouper Working Group call will be Wednesday, 18-Oct at 12pm EDT.

-- 
Jessica Bibbee, Technical Analyst
Internet2

mobile: +1-734-255-6644

The Fall 2006 Internet2 Member Meeting:
Because the best way to predict the future is to keep inventing it.
http://events.internet2.edu/2006/fall-mm/