Grouper Developers Forum

[Steve Olshansky <>]

Draft Minutes
*Grouper Call: 5-March-2008*

*Attending*
Tom Barton, U. Chicago (chair)
Kathryn Huxtable, independent
Sanjay Vivek, Newcastle U. (UK)
Gary Brown, Bristol U. (UK)
Shilen Patel, Duke
Joy Veronneau, Cornell U.
Bert Bee-Lindgren, Georgia Tech U.
Steve Barrett, Cornell U.
Chris Hyzer, U. Penn
Mike Olive, Stanford
RL "Bob" Morgan, U. Washington
Steve Olshansky, Internet2 (scribe)

**New Action Items**
[AI] (Tom) will consult with Blair about duplicate columns of IDs/UUIDs
[AI] (SteveB and Chris) will sidebar about Simple and non-Simple SOAP 
Web Services, and report back to the group.


*Carryover Action Items*
[AI] (TomZ) will start a discussion about the potential applicability of 
the Shibboleth extension framework on the Grouper-Dev list
[AI] (UI Subgroup/Jennifer) will offer some corrections to the UI, and 
some additional pages
[AI] (Chris and Shilen) will investigate performance degradation issues 
and report back to the group.
[AI] (All) review open JIRA items and discuss via the list as inclined.

**Discussion**

*Updates*
UI
April is looking likely for a next release, thus we ought to be aiming 
for a feature freeze in the near future, and some update to the UI is 
likely to be included. The subgroup reported that they are working on a 
recommended set of terms for Grouper concepts, and are working on 
incorporating them into the relevant screens for wider review.

API
Chris and Shilen investigated performance degradation issues and 
reported that so far there is no apparent reason why the use of 
Hibernate3 would lead to ~10% slower performance, although the 
performance problems do appear to be related to this. Work is continuing 
to isolate the problem, as there were some features added that also 
contributed to overhead and thus there is a need to roll back to the 
point where Hibernate3 was the only new factor. They are still 
investigating and will report back.

Implementing foreign keys and corresponding Hibernate mappings may be 
desirable for the next release. A key objective is to make Grouper 
independent of RDBMSs. There was some discussion about whether a change 
of this magnitude is a good use of our time, in light of other 
priorities. Apache DdlUtils was also suggested as worth investigating in 
this context.
http://db.apache.org/ddlutils/

There is an underlying need to ensure that group identifiers will be 
persistent, even if the group names change. UUID may be the best option 
for this. Is there also a need for IDs as well?

[AI] (Tom) will consult with Blair about duplicate columns of IDs/UUIDs

Searching is also an area that could do with some performance 
improvement. Performing complex queries would be more efficient, v. 
doing multiple single queries and presenting the union as the result.

Web Services/SOAP
Chris is looking at how best to approach this in our context. Once he 
changes clients to support this, he will work on "groups-lite" on top.

Given that there is Simple SOAP, non-Simple SOAP, and Lite (not SOAP) 
what distinct application scenarios are most appropriate for each? Would 
it make sense for us to start simpler and get more complex in response 
to demand, rather that implementing complexity in the expectation of 
need? Once the functionality is in there it will need to be supported. 
Is there really value in having a simple method for each web service call?

[AI] (SteveB and Chris) will sidebar about Simple and non-Simple SOAP 
Web Services, and report back to the group.

Groups-Lite (formerly RESTful Web Service)
See mail from RL "Bob" to the dev list 5-March-2008 regarding updates in 
the wiki.
https://wiki.internet2.edu/confluence/display/GrouperWG/Groups-Lite+Web+Services

Ldappc
Kathryn is performing performance tests on traditional Ldappc, the Brown 
approach, and using an intermediate DB table. The Brown approach looks 
promising, and Kathryn is modifying that to improve performance even 
more. Her work continues and she will report back to the list soon. Her 
early estimate is that 4 weeks would be required to complete this work.

Next call will be Wed 19-March Noon EDT.


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