Grouper Developers Forum

["Cramton, James" <>]

Hi Chris,
 
It looks like that will address the issues we'd seen here at Brown. Thanks 
for the quick fix. 

________________________________

From: Chris Hyzer 
[mailto:]
Sent: Tue 4/29/2008 2:19 PM
To: Cramton, James; 

Subject: RE: Brown running Grouper 1.3.0 rc1 in QA



Ø  CSS tweaks needed in several browsers-typically, fonts are too bold and 
squished together, especially in buttons. Informal

Ø  polling shows that appearance is fine in IE7 (Windows), Firefox 2 
(Windows), but needs optimization in Firefox 1.5 (Linux), 

Ø  Firefox 2 (MacOS X)  and Safari 3.1.1 (MacOS X).

 

 

I committed a fix for this in 1.3.0 RC2+

 

Here is the old and new (if we reproduced right).  If you see anything else 
with the UI, please be sure to include a screenshot.

 

Note: we already wanted to replace the "a" tags that look like rectangles 
with links, but didn't have time before now.  I think the problem was with 
letter spacing, in normal browsers it looked way too spaced out, so the 
letter spacing -1 brought it in.  But esoteric browsers didn't like bringing 
it in.  So, we should just make things simple and present links as links, and 
buttons that submit forms as rectangles.  Btw, we plan to suggest a 
reorganization of the buttons (maybe categorization) so they are easier to 
find for 1.4.

 

Thanks,

Chris

 

Ps. As an aside, at Penn sometimes we have links that look like rectangles, 
and using the html "button" tag works well across browsers, and is more of a 
natural fit.  Not sure if the <html:link> custom tag can generate html 
<button>'s...  but anyways, not a big deal, links might be better anyways for 
usability.

 

From: Cramton, James 
[mailto:]
 
Sent: Monday, April 28, 2008 4:47 PM
To: 

Subject: [grouper-dev] Brown running Grouper 1.3.0 rc1 in QA

 

After a week of fighting other fires, I finally had a chance today to upgrade 
Brown's Grouper QA environment to Grouper 1.3.0 rc1.  All in all, it went 
pretty smoothly, and I like the improvements to the UI quite a lot. I have a 
few observations on the process to share; most of these pertain to an 
institution upgrading a large implementation, and I'm not sure if any other 
institutions have taken this leap yet.  We're in lockdown during our reading 
period leading up to final exams, but if all goes as planned, we should be 
able to deploy 1.3.0 to production shortly after reading period ends on May 
16.

 

My notes on the upgrade from Grouper 1.2.1 to 1.3.0 rc1:

 

Environment:

App server: Sun 4100 x86 running 64 bit RHEL4 

DB Server: Sun 4100 x86 running 64 bit RHEL4

No clustering or load balancing or redundancy, at least for now

 

Apache 2.2.4 
Tomcat 5.5 
Java 1.5 
Linux Redhat Enterprise Server 4 
Oracle 10g DB 
SunOne Directory server 5.2

 

 

Scale of implementation:

65,000 active groups (mostly course groups)

17,000 active users

Nightly provisioning took 3 - 4 hours under Grouper 1.2.1

 

Observations:

-          Tool tips and infodots very useful, and will be well received by 
our end users

-          CSS tweaks needed in several browsers-typically, fonts are too 
bold and squished together, especially in buttons. Informal polling shows 
that appearance is fine in IE7 (Windows), Firefox 2 (Windows), but needs 
optimization in Firefox 1.5 (Linux), Firefox 2 (MacOS X)  and Safari 3.1.1 
(MacOS X).

-          I used the Oracle sql script to update the DB schema from 1.2.1 to 
1.3.0; this took about 12 minutes to complete, without incident.  By my way 
of reading it, the DB upgrade instructions recommend adding foreign keys 
using the addforeignkeys ant target, but the Oracle script already added 
them; the ant script coughed out all sorts of errors because of this double 
duty. I suggest revising the documentation to be more specific about when to 
use the ant target vs. DB-specific scripts.

-          I ran into errors when I first built using my old 
grouper.ehcache.xml file that were resolved by using the version of 
grouper.ehcache.xml from cvs. However, I've always been puzzled by which 
config files are packaged with the build. Sources.xml is certainly very 
installation-specific, but many of the other files, such as this cache file, 
and log4j properties, and others, are in cvs in states that are highly usable 
to most installations, at least for a start. I think it would be helpful to 
bundle a more complete set of config files, with config file documentation 
describing potential customizations.

-          As a point of reference, we've been experimenting with performance 
in our system, and we have yet to find a performance bottleneck. In 
particular, in this build, we upped the  comparator.sort.limit in the 
ui/resources/grouper/media.properties file to 50,000, and we have not been 
able to document a significant performance hit. Our largest group contains 
17,000 members, and it displays a sorted list of members within 30 seconds, 
even when we display all 17,000 members on 1 page.  Why someone would want to 
do that is unclear, but it does perform well in our system.

 

We'll let our nightly provisioning run as normal tonight, and I may have new 
observations from that process in the next few days. So far, however, it's 
looking good!  Thanks to all the folks who worked on this build!

 

 

James Cramton

Lead Programmer/Analyst

Brown University



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