Grouper Developers Forum

[Steve Olshansky <>]

Grouper Call: 20-Feb-2008

*Attending*
Tom Barton, U. Chicago (chair)
Gary Brown, Bristol U.
Caleb Racey, Newcastle U.
Shilen Patel, Duke
Chris Hyzer, U. Penn
Jennifer Yuan, U. Penn
Bill Kasenchar,  U. Penn
Tom Zeller, U. Memphis
RL "Bob" Morgan, U. Washington
Bert Bee-Lindgren, Georgia Tech U.
Steve Barrett, Cornell U.
Joy Veronneau, Cornell U.
James Cramton, Brown U.
Dave Donnelly, Stanford U.
Steve Olshansky, Internet2 (scribe)

**New Action Items**
[AI] (Chris and Shilen) will investigate performance degradation issues and 
report back to the group.
[AI] (TomZ) will start a discussion about the potential applicability of the 
Shibboleth extension framework on the Grouper-Dev list
[AI] (Chris and Tom) will refine the “Groups Light” Work in the wiki
[AI] (UI Subgroup/Jennifer) will offer some corrections to the UI, and some 
additional pages

*Carryover Action Items*
[AI] (All) review open JIRA items and discuss via the list as inclined.

**Discussion**

*Grouper-API progress*
Chris and Shilen reported that Hibernate3 is suitable for Grouper development 
work, and since Hibernate2 is not receiving much attention from the developers 
now, and v3 is much better, it makes sense for us to make the transition. There 
will be information in the wiki about upgrading, for those interested.

Hibernate3 supports transactions for the first time, which is a good reason to 
make the move. Transactions are important in the web services context to support 
batch operations and ensure consistency.

TomZ reported on the unresolvable subject removal tool, which will be a command 
line tool to remove dangling memberships in subject sources. It would be 
instructive to review the extensions framework developed by Blair, for those 
interested in developing other Grouper extensions.

Shilen reported that doing searches with Hibernate3 is taking longer than with 
Hibernate2, by roughly 10%. This doesn’t appear to be expected behavior…
[AI] (Chris and Shilen) will investigate performance degradation issues and 
report back to the group.

TomZ expressed an interest in learning more about how the Shibboleth project 
handles their extension framework.
[AI] (TomZ) will start a discussion about this on the Grouper-Dev list

*Call for feedback on Groups-Lite Web Services* 
<https://wiki.internet2.edu/confluence/display/GrouperWG/Groups-Lite+Web+Services>
The goal isn't REST, it's simplicity. But RESTfulness ought to help. The intent 
is to characterize an interface for lightweight group services that can be used 
in many applications for which very simple group manipulation is needed. And it 
should be implementable by other providers of group services beyond grouper.

RL "Bob" discussed RESTful group services work underway at U. Washington along 
these lines, toward the goal of accessibility and understandability for 
developers. It was noted that there are 2 approaches – light on the client side 
and light on the server side. The goal is to make it easy for the client to get 
a representation of the resource, modify it, return it as an update.

There was some discussion about whether there would be value in creating a 
Grouper-specific XHTML schema – "GXHTML"? is runtime schema validation a problem?

[AI] (Tom and Chris) will update the wiki page, and consider this topic in the 
context of what should be included in the next release.

*Updates & issues from Grouper-UI subgroup*
<https://wiki.internet2.edu/confluence/download/attachments/19120/GrouperHiDef010303.pdf?version=1>

Jennifer reviewed the UI material in the wiki. They are taking an evolutionary 
approach, toward the goal of making the UI more intuitive for new users, e.g. to 
allow non-technical users to perform administrative functions. Various 
approaches to terminology were discussed, toward this goal.

[AI] (UI Subgroup) will offer some corrections to the UI, and some additional 
pages on unresolvable subject removal tool



--
Steve Olshansky
Internet2 Middleware & Security Flywheel
http://middleware.internet2.edu/
http://security.internet2.edu/