This session presented the technical architecture and demonstrations for Luminis 5. In my eyes Luminis 5 is a product architected so differently from Luminis 4 that it almost represents a new product. Asked about release dates, the product technical architect deferred to the product manager who relayed the planned beta at the end of 2009 without a firm general release date in 2010.

The architecture is very framework based with all the Java and other keywords thrown in. The development environment is more agile with regular builds and ongoing unit and performance testing. Keywords and architectural strategies:

• Spring Framework
• Hibernate object relationship management
• Decoupled presentation objects to permit support for a variety of presentation layers (e.g., Liferay portal, Oracle portal, uPortal)
• Terracotta cluster management
• CAS
• Separate administration node to remove administrative load from user facing nodes
• No email and calendar delivered with Luminis 5
• OpenLDAP
• Apache JackRabbit CMS for portal content management
• Apache CXF (a standards-based messaging tool) — may not keep as Spring could provide this functionality
• Flex for some channel content (primarily administrative channels, Flex XML not exposed)
• Clustering taken care of by baseline Luminis 5, no longer our responsibility. Probably still want load balancer but Luminis 5 may mean it need not support SSL termination or sticky sessions as sessions will persist across notes.
• Inter-portlet communication (action in one channel results in update in another channel)
• IDM support (UDC supported solutions)
• Fine-grained Access Controls rewritten with Flex interface
• CPIP deprecated (although GCF and Secret Store still use non-exposed CPIP libraries migrated into GCF)

With the new Luminis 5 framework and TerraCotta cluster management, configman can be deprecated and settings modifications can be pushed to all portal notes without the need for a restart. The demo showed live changes in the admin node equivalent to a configman setting that immediately took affect in the user nodes.

The development team is performing regular performance testing to watch for performance trends as Luminis 5 evolves.

Discussing future migrations to Luminis 5, there was discussion of an ETL (Extract, Translate, Load) based migration model. This would include extracts to XML, translation and then load to the new systems. This methodology would be a vast improvement over the migration model clients are still suffering when going from Luminis III to Luminis 4.

Group and Course Tools are replaced by Community. Accessing a My Communities tab presents a series of channels making up a community. Selecting a group in a separate channel updates a collection of other channels such as community photos, music and other content. Asked about migrating Luminis 4 groups the answer came back that “we haven’t, but we can.”

Tags: luminis, summit, sungardhe

Joshua presented the Luminis opening session which was a high-level overview of why to use Luminis and where it is headed. He started by highlighting Luminis use at a few colleges to share the possibilities of implementing portal technology at an institution. The key idea I took from this was a possible new analytic to measure. One school measures the percent of students loggin into their portal after the students receive their admissions info (which includes instructions to log in for the first time). This is a measurement that I think would be valuable for us as well. Not only if they log in after being given instructions, but how long before they do. Is it immediate, a week later, longer?

He also shared the product roadmap which contained no surprises. The one note contrary to the published product roadmap was a note that we may see some Luminis 5 components prior to the planned release date. This is in alignment with the promise CEO Ron Lang made in his address regarding getting functionality to customers sooner. It will be interesting to see how this plays out given the vast differences between Luminis 4 and 5.

In this opening session we didn’t see many details but here are some random notes.

• Post Luminis 4.2 release supporting Red Hat Linux AS 4.* and Oracle 11G
• Luminis 5
  • Banner channels rewritten
  • Collaboration and community functionality will see academic and non-academic environments
  • Acceleration of functionality time to market
  • Introduction of AJAX and FLEX interfaces

After the session I went and found the Luminis Developers’ Lounge. It is nice to see that we have a true room again after the fabricated room of last year.

In a discussion with the Luminis Technical Architect we learned more details of Luminis 5 which sound promising. One concern though is that it will be such a new product that I worry about out of the box stability and new growing pains. They are obviously working now in a new development environment that should result in better product releases than we’ve seen in the past.

Confirmation received that email and calendar will no longer be delivered as part of Luminis. Existing Sun licenses will be migrated to Sun directly. Email and calendar integration will be expanded to include Sun, Microsoft, Google and — later — Zimbra.

The portal framework is obviously focused on Liferay but they believe support will be available for other frameworks (e.g., Oracle Portal, uPortal) based upon their new architecture. Liferay though is the primary Luminis 5 target.

More technical info to come in the Luminis 5 Architecture session.

Tags: luminis, summit, sungardhe