Software Development Community Blog
University of Edinburgh Software Development Community Blog
uPortal version 4.10 has been recently released, which has lots of great new features, most notably the move over to a Bootstrap 3 responsive design.
http://www.apereo.org/uportal/download/uportal-4-1-0
We’re also pleased to note that Ross Nicoll in Development Services has contributed to this release. That’s great to see, and hopefully something we can do more of in subsequent releases.
Thanks Ross :)!
If you’ve ever wanted to find out which views reference a certain table/column condition in an Oracle database, there is a view called user_views which can be queried as the owner of the view and contains the sql used to define the population of the view. There is a slight trick to querying it though, as that column is a Long datatype. You can use the following SQL:
select * from user_views
where dbms_xmlgen.getxml('select text from user_views
where view_name = ''' || view_name || '''')
like '%<thing I want to search for>%';
Just replace the like with the thing you want to search for. Hope that’s useful!
Open Source projects and code are an important aspect of what we do, so it’s good for us to be able to contribute and share with the wider community. Here’s an update of some of the recent work we’ve been doing.
On the uPortal front we’ve contributed a bug fix to the core uPortal framework which should be incorporated into the uPortal 4 patch releases.
And the Blackboard Virtual Classroom portlet which we originally contributed to the Apereo foundation (then JASIG) has been updated by the University of Wisconsin to version 2.
We have submitted a building block we wrote a while ago to do dynamic web forms to project oscelot, which is an open source community site based around eLearning. We chose to release the bb-webform-tool (as we call it) code on Github.
We have also submitted the a Building Block which allows creation and integration with Confluence Wiki spaces to Project Oscelot, and have put the bb-confluence-tool code on Github in preparation.
The portlet and building block code above have been released under the MIT license.
There’s a very good blog article on the Spring IO site covering how to expose Spring JPA Data as a restful service using the @RepositoryRestResource annotation, you can read it here:
http://spring.io/guides/gs/accessing-data-rest/
Seems like a really powerful and easy way to build RESTful web services!
If you’re needing to create a new JSR-286 portlet, the Apereo Foundation (formerly JASIG), have provided a Maven Archetype for the creation of a skeleton portlet.
Essentially you can run the following command:
mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=org.jasig.portlet.archetype -DarchetypeArtifactId=jsr286-archetype
It will ask you for the group, artefact and package information, and will automatically create a skeleton Spring MVC Portlet for you.
See the using the uMobile Portlet Archetype article for full details.