Grouper Developers Forum

[Emily Eisbruch <>]

Draft Minutes, Grouper call 13-Feb-2013 

Attending:

Tom Barton, U. Chicago (chair)  

Chris Hyzer, University of Pennsylvania  

Shilen Patel, Duke University

Bill Thompson, Unicon

Jim Fox, University of Washington

Steve Olshansky, Internet2  

Emily Eisbruch, Internet2, scribe

New Action Items

[AI] (All) Return to discuss the idea of enabling roles to be grantees of privileges at the 27-Feb-2013 call

[AI] (Chris) investigate issues around Java 7 and JUNIT 

[AI] (Emily) look at thread on attributes and permissions and make

suggestions on improving wiki doc if needed.

Carry Over Action Items

[AI] SteveO share the Grouper Download page notification with Andrew to

get his input

[AI] (Shilen) start a design wiki for the legacy attribute migration

(still working on)

https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/Grouper/Legacy+attribute+migration

[AI] (Emily) reach out to frequent contributors on the list for refreshing

the case studies (in progress)

[AI] (Chris) upgrade the Grouper demo to the latest Grouper version 2.1

[AI] (unassigned) add info to the wiki regarding doing testing on

provisioning

[AI] (unassigned) put test data in the Grouper demo to show using an LDAP

source.

Discussion

Lessons from recent field experience

There was discussion on the email list about the group admin priv assignment that happens when a user creates a group. The way the code works is that if you create a group, you automatically get admin privileges on the group. This is done by the API. Concern is that if the individual who created the group gets removed from the course admin group and then they continue to have the admin privilege

https://lists.internet2.edu/sympa/arc/grouper-dev/2013-02/msg00012.html

Chris suggests to potentially use a rule to prevent that from happening. 

Chris will try rule or a hook as proof of concept and the group can give feedback

Could be it makes sense to use a role, so the admin priv. gets assigned to the role instead of to the individual who creates the group.

 It was agreed that more built in options for how this is handled would be useful. 

Would help with best practices - to encourage use of roles or groups instead of individuals for assignment of  privileges

Q: Does this mean doubling the number of groups you'd have?

A: Don't have to use a group for the group admin privilege , but we could have the option available

Duke uses a model like this.

-Could be that we should document attributes and permissions better

-People have questions on fundamental things

-Chris can take a pass at it. Looking at the wiki traffic

[AI] (Emily) look at thread on attributes and permissions and make

suggestions on improving wiki doc if needed.

[AI] (All) Return to discuss the idea of enabling roles to be grantees of privileges at the 27-Feb-2013 call

Java 7 and Tomcat 7

Chris created a JIRA on supporting Java 7

https://bugs.internet2.edu/jira/browse/GRP-878

-Currently Grouper  does not support Tomcat 7 and Java 7

-Tests don't pass on Java 7, however this could be an issue with the tests only

-Java 6 Is end of life at end of February 2013.

-Not a big deal on the server side, but the applets could be a concern to some

-People want Grouper to run on a supported java

-U Washington is running Java 7 (except the UI) and it works fine

-We could test the UI and if it works then we can conclude that Java 7 works with Grouper 2.1

-Someone noted on the list a problems w Java 7 and Oracle

-this could be a JUNIT issue

-sometimes things don't work in JUNIT, but you run then individually and they do work.

   -External resources and caches can cause problems

[AI] (Chris) investigate issues around Java 7 and JUNIT 

-Tomcat 7 is more of an issue, but luckily Tomcat 6 is not end of life

-Tomcat 7 is not designed to be backward compatible w Tomcat 6

-We can tackle that in Grouper 2.21 or later

Grouper UI Work

Michael reported that the Grouper UI work is coming along well. 

-The new UI is mocked up. 

-There were 3 rounds of testing at U Chicago and using the remote tools

-Testers had good success rate in completing the tasks

-Got good feedback and incorporated the feedback into the wireframes

-Now working on the developers notes

-Then the Development team will need to read thru those notes and let Michael know if things need to

be clarified

Tom: what are the technical requirements that we must fill to power this UI?

-Accessible widgets is a key 

-Dojo is being considered as a tool

-Start building in the demo server environment

-Code it in subversion and do a build on the demo server

-Michael: there is enough to start with, even though developer notes are not done

Connecting with other projects

-There is work in Europe on the EU GN3+

-SURFnet is involved and is proposing work in the groups API space

Shiro and Spring

Work with Shiro and Spring is in the Grouper roadmap as not yet assigned to a version

https://spaces.internet2.edu/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=14517754

uPortal

-Univ. of Chicago has a uPortal deployment that uses Grouper

-There was an issue around interaction of the technologies

-There was a portlet that has a few users with many group memberships

-the portal would "suck in" all the memberships when those users logged in

-The team is working on workarounds within portal

-in the future we may want to fix this connector

Amazon

Chris is looking at Grouper integration with Amazon messaging.

https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/Grouper/Amazon+messaging+POC

Next Grouper Dev Call: Wed. Feb. 27, 2013 at noon ET

Emily Eisbruch, Technology Transfer Analyst

Internet2

office: +1-734-352-4996 | mobile +1-734-730-5749