Grouper Developers Forum

[Emily Eisbruch <>]

Draft Minutes: Grouper Call of July 16, 2014

Attending:

Tom Barton, U. Chicago, chair

Chris Hyzer, University of Pennsylvania

Dave Langenberg, U. Chicago

Shilen Patel, Duke

Misagh Moayyed, Unicon
Jim Fox, U. Washington

Emily Eisbruch, Internet2, scribe

New Action items

[AI] (Dave) update the PSP Moving Forward Wiki page to reflect new thoughts and suggestions.

https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/Grouper/PSP+Moving+Forward

[AI] (Chris)  will look into the error message issue on the demo access issue if no EPPN is sent.

Carry Over Action items
 
[AI] (Dave) create a Grouper training video on the new features in  Grouper 2.2

[AI] (Shilen) create a Grouper training video on the new Grouper UI

[AI) (DaveL) look at PSP ChangeLogDataConnector Inconsistency issue

https://lists.internet2.edu/sympa/arc/grouper-users/2014-02/msg00047.html

[AI] (Shilen) investigate ways to get new attribtues in a single step

DISCUSSION

Post-release review

Thoughts on the release process:

-Tom: Dev team works well together

-Shilen: Would be good to avoid the summer for the release

-Chris: All times of year are busy

-DaveL : summer is more busy

Training Video

Dave still plans to develop the training video.

Tom can work on it if Dave needs to drop that task.

Error on Tomcat Startup

https://lists.internet2.edu/sympa/arc/grouper-users/2014-07/msg00055.html

Chris suggested swapping out the tarball to address this issue, even though this is not usually a best practice,

Shlen agreed this swap of the tarball would be OK in this case.

Dave suggested perhaps we should be using the JTDS driver instead of the Microsoft driver.

Feedback from the Field

Chris Phillips provided feedback accessing the Grouper demo when no EPPN is sent.

It would be helpful to get an error message instead of a blank page.

[AI] (Chris)  will look into the error message issue on the demo access issue if no EPPN is sent.

https://lists.internet2.edu/sympa/arc/grouper-dev/2014-07/msg00004.html

 

Tomcat 7

We should support Tomcat 7 in the upcoming Grouper 2.3 

Note: The Shib project is moving towards Jetty.  

We may want to test Jetty as part of the work on Grouper 2.3

Suggestion to Use GitHub Instead of SVN

Misagh and Dave advocated moving from SVN to GitHub.

Issue with moving to GitHub is the amount of work effort  in the transition.

Misagh said he was willing to handle the bulk of this work.

Advantage of GitHub:

The Grouper project would likely receive more community contributions if Grouper was on GitHub.

The CAS project has seen an increase in contributions since moving to GitHub. 

Suggestion to also switch from Ant to Maven for the build process.

Dave noted that using Maven is already feasible.

Note: after this call, the transition to GitHub went forward. See

https://github.com/Internet2/grouper

Grouper ActiveMQ Provisioner

At the Internet2 Global Summit in April 2014, at the Grouper BOF there was discussion of using ActiveMQ as a provisioning strategy:

https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/Grouper/Grouper+Call+9-April-2014+BOF+at+Global+Summit

(see section on "Apache ActiveMQ")

One feature of using the ActiveMQ approach is that much of the provisioning work would be left to the deploying sites

Michael Gettes stated in a recent email that CMU has developed code for using ActiveMQ with Grouper that they'd like to contribute, once some licensing and tech transfer issues are worked out, most likely within a few months.

https://lists.internet2.edu/sympa/arc/grouper-users/2014-07/msg00050.html

Dave: another suggested approach to Grouper provisioning strategy moving forward would be to use a straight changelog to LDAP, with selection based on group attributes.

Chris: we should also consider making changes to the changelog to facilitate provisioning. 

[AI] (Dave) update the PSP Moving Forward Wiki page to reflect new thoughts and suggestions.

https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/Grouper/PSP+Moving+Forward

Next Call: Wed. July 30, 2014 at noon ET.

Emily Eisbruch, Technology Transfer Analyst

Internet2

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