This year 2011,  UOC won the SOC’s open request launched by the Catalonian Goverment.  SOC is the on-line formation for free that the Generalitat de Catalunya offers to mainly unemployed citizens.

In that frame, our university facilitated the environment where the elearning took place. Indeed, we created a new environment, as a ’stand-alone’ Campus, costumized with the corresponding logo, footer, and other features and it even  followed a different learning period than the “classic” Campus - SOC did not last a regular semesters but one or two months, depending on the course.

At a glance, some of the features that this new environment offered were:

1. 700 courses (between 25 and 50 hours each one)
2. 17.500 people registered at SOC, 80% out of them being unemployed.
3. 83 different training sessions.

After the experience gained with SOC, we are now wondering whether it would be possible to automate all these processes in order to sell and easily deploy Virtual Campus to third parties.

Recently, we have made changes in the UOC Identity Provider used through RedIRIS to support some more services.

RedIRIS is the Spanish academic and research network that provides advanced communication services to the scientific community and national universities and permit to share resources. Precisely, it permits the access to the services and resources to each of the members. In order to validate the network membership, RedIRIS delegates the authentication process to the member institution through the institution Identity Provider, implemented by the own institution.

An Identity Provider is a web application that is running in the scope of the member institution that perfoms the local authentication with a credentials screen. Thus, when you try to access to one of the services available in RedIRIS, you are redirected to a page where you can choose one of the supported Identity Providers.

In our case, we would choose UOC. After that, we would be redirected to the UOC Identity provider web page where we will be ask for our campus credentials. Once they are validated, an assertion following the sintax of the PAPI protocol is generated and sent back to redIRIS, which would grant access to the requested service or resource.

A few months ago, the UOC decided to reconsider the multilinguism functioning of its Virtual Campus together with its whole educational offer.  As a result, it was decided to establish two different Virtual Campuses: (a) a Principal Campus and (b) a Global Campus. The first one, the Principal Campus, would display all the educational and Ph.D programmes in Catalan, but it would allow to navigate in both languages,  Catalan and Spanish. Alternatively, the Global Campus would become that on-line environment, containing  those courses displayed in any language but Catalan -so far, these courses could be either in Spanish or English-, and its users would be able to navigate either in Catalan, Spanish, English or French, as they wish.

The UOC participated at the first plugfest of Learning Registry that took place in Arlington the 15 and 16 of June of 2011.

The Learning Registry (LR) is a infrastructure created with the collaboration of the US Departments of Education and Defense to make federal learning resources and primary source materials easier to find by different organizations. The idea of this meeting resided in diffusing and extending the LR with the contributions of the diferent participants in order to make it more powerful.

The participation of UOC consisted of adding metadata to support, as a searchable resource, a BLTI application. Our contribution, definately,  would benefit the difusion of the Learning Apps project, main reason of having us there.

For more information about our participation at the Inaugural Learning Registry Plugfest, please, have a look at the following presentation.

The beginning of the semester is a critical period for the OLT team because many students log into the Campus at the same time. In order to maintain the UOC Campus as much stable as possible, it has been established a quarantine period during which no changes on software should be made.
Precisely, at the beginning of semester, next September, the following quarantine’s period should be considered:

• Quarantine from 14th Sept to 30th Sept (homologate classes start the 21st of September)
• Quarantine from 10th Oct to 30th Oct (post-degree classes start the 19th of October)
• One week has been left in between the quarantine periods - from 3rd to 6th of October- to install only important bugs.

Also, it has been changed the software installation calendar. Indeed, from now onwards, we distribute the calendar by technologies: Tomcat’s on monday, jboss on Tuesday. Check the new installation calendar, in which we have divided the JBoss apps (mostly used and installed) into subgroups. For more information, please, view this presentation.

Developers from OLT have a new environment for deploying its web applications. It’s a JBoss 6 running into a 1.6 Java virtual machine. New applications are aimed to de deployed into this container.

Furthermore, existing connectors for applications through the Campus had an update and it’s time for the developers to update their client applications.  For this reason, it has been defined an update schedule for exisiting applications for its update.

Finally, developers have a new set of maven’s poms and archetypes for developing java tools and applications. This set covers the actual development methodology and quality issues, such documentation, bug management, continous integration and installation workflow.

This article aims to provide a better insight into the state of the art of the artifactory repository at UOC. In this regard, on the diagram below, it is shown how the workstation interaction with subversion and artifactory is similar to hudson interaction with subversion and hudson: the code is downloaded from subversion, is compiled with the libraries from the artifactory and the result of the compilation is published in the form of a maven library in the artifactory. In a future stage, jira integration will help to create the subversion project and the hudson task.

Regarding the state of the art of the artifactory strictly speaking, the following information should be pointed out:

• Artifactory has been migrated to a new url: te.artifactory.uoc.es.
• Any needed library can be added to the artifactory; it is not necessary and not recommended to use local maven repositories with external libraries imported.
• Dependencies and distribution management have to be updated to the new url in pom.xml.
• Basic libraries from OLT, Office of Learning Technologies, UOC, (like OKI ones) are available in artifactory as well as the necessary archetypes to create maven projects easily.

For more information, you may want to check the following presentation.

We have recently implemented Continuous Integration for assuring a successful process of making different modules work together.

The UOC has different projects organized with a maven structure and, often, some of them are used as libraries in the form of maven artifacts. When there are changes, all the projects that depend on these libraries could stop compiling, i.e. they are broken.
In addition, to always guarantee a successful compilation, it is necessary to have these libraries updated permanently somewhere, the cost of this process sometimes being very high if carried out manually.

In order to solve these problems, we implemented Continuous Integration since it atomatically (a) rebuilds with every change, (b) runs all unit and acceptance tests, (c) publishes build results, (d) notifies developers if build breaks, and (e) labels successful builds in source repository.

The Continous Integration tool employed by UOC is Hudson, an opensource tool accessible here. If additional functionality is required, it can be easily extended with many plug-in’s . Even you can write your own plug-in!

In order to share these artifacts among the different projects, we use a repository manager called Artifactory. It can act as a proxy of several maven repositories. It is located in the Monaco machine and the instance in the UOC is accessible through this url.

The combination of Hudson and Artifactory provides the necessary mechanisms to successfully carry out the continuous integration in the UOC.

The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) is a global university, currently offering degrees in Catalan and Spanish, and shortly in English. The UOC is a fully online university with over 47,000 students, an average level of concurrence over 2,500 users connected simultaneously and a maximum of 6,000 users connected simultaneously at peak times like during the submission of activities and the beginning of semester. The prime objective of the UOC is to enable people to achieve their learning tasks and needs in a flexible and efficient way. Moreover, UOC aims to provide education to people and contribute to their progress and to that of the society.

The Office of Learning Technologies is in charge of the design and development of UOC student’s learning environment and tools. The Office is formed by more than 50 people with different backgrounds and expertise. Such a multidisciplinary and flexible team is key to answer UOC users’ needs (staff, professors, tutors and students). The result of such a dynamic environment with a high level of applications being developed and maintained at the same time represent a lot of work for the Quality Assurance (QA) team.

Until last year, design and development tasks were managed with a bug tracking tool and a task-request management tool. However, these tools slowed the process and didn’t answer the needs of the Office. Besides the 40 computer scientists of the Office working on different applications, several other UOC departments are part of the process of making a tool available to the end user. Therefore, there are several steps to be followed and the tools that were being used covered only specific parts of this long process. As a consequence, emails and phone calls were complements needed to fulfill the process.

The deployment process is a strict and thorough one that requires action such as the client acceptation, the validation of errors from the project manager, functional testing, software performance testing load testing, etc. This process implies several different people and teams and a large number of applications. With such an environment, it was decided that the best solution was to implement a tool that could work for the whole process. After some benchmarking, we selected JIRA and started working with the trial version several months.

The introduction of JIRA to manage bugs as well as the deployment process has provided lots of benefits such as an increase in productivity and satisfaction. The previous bug tracking had 1,500 issues in its two years of usage. JIRA had 1,600 after six months of usage. The different teams and people involved have integrated the tool recognizing its advantages; it facilitates internal management, reduces unneeded communication and keeps track of all the steps in the process.

The management of a new software application starts with the opening of the project record, where the key points of the application and its technological requirements are stated. Once all the environments are ready for the deployment of the application, a new deployment type issue is created and this issue goes through a workflow in which all the teams in charge of the different environments intervene. This workflow includes installation of the services, related bugs, doubts, validations, QA verifications, returning to the previous version when needed and approval. As a result, we have an amazing and centralized management system for deployments.

This successful story has brought other technology related teams at UOC to want to learn more about JIRA and integrate it in their processes. We are currently managing 80 projects and adding these new team will make the number increase to 500 projects and differents workflows, all in less than a year. The introduction of JIRA as a tool to centralize all these processes has been a success for the technology at the UOC.