Congratulations to Eric Dalquist on uPortal 3.0.0 RC2

In which I post just a few of the many words of thanks owed to Eric Dalquist, lead developer and release engineer of the uPortal 3.0 effort, on the occasion of the release of uPortal 3.0.0 RC2.

I understand there are others whose efforts have contributed significantly to the uPortal 3.0 effort, including those Eric cites in his announcement email (quoted below). Nonetheless, JA-SIG, Unicon, and I myself (the only one for whom I can authoritatively speak!) owe Eric Dalquist tremendous thanks for his tireless efforts to bring this next-generation release of uPortal to fruition. (Thanks are also due to his sponsoring institution, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, for allowing him time and opportunity to be so involved in uPortal).

So I want to take this opportunity to say, publicly and in front of the world, Eric, congratulations. I know you were a valued employee, a capable "rockstar" software developer and open source leader during your time here at Unicon. You've continued to make an important difference in advancing quality open source software for higher education and producing virtuous code -- uPortal and your smaller projects, such as the IRC to Confluence logger that already is helping the Fluid project as well.

I look forward to greeting Eric and others at the upcoming JA-SIG conference April 27th through 30th in St. Paul, Minnesota to celebrate this and other progress in several open source projects at this conference, including uPortal, Sakai, CAS, Fedora repository, DSpace, Kuali, and Spring PortletMVC.

Here's a re-post of Eric's release announcement email:

JA-SIG is proud to announce the release of uPortal 3.0.0 Release Candidate 2. This is the second release in the uPortal 3.0.0 line based on the core uPortal code base and the first 3.0.0 release candidate based on the core uPortal code base. Full release notes are available in the wiki
along with a uPortal 3.0 release overview http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/UPC/3.0
This release includes the following new features and fixes:

• A new theme and skin along with a more understandable
  directory structure for layout and skin related files. The new skin is
  also using jQuery to provide drag and drop features which are enabled
  by default. Thanks to Gary Thompson from Unicon and Jen Bourey from
  Yale for this work.
• Layout cache friendly dynamic title
  support for channels and portlets. Dynamic titles for channels and
  portlets work on every render now. Thanks to Nick Bolton from Unicon
  for this work.
• Quickstart generation scripts. Quickstart generation is now as
  simple as running an Ant task.
• Consistent
  cache scheme and configuration based on Spring-Modules Caching API.
  Most existing dynamic caches have been converted to use the new API and
  it is currently backed by EHCache though other caching frameworks can
  easily be used.
• CAS 3.2 is bundled with uPortal and is used
  as the default authentication mechanism. Thanks to Scott Battaglia from
  Rutgers, Andrew Petro from Unicon and Jen Bourey from Yale for this
  work.
• CAS Proxy tickets are available to JSR-168 portlets as a user
  attribute. Thanks to Jen Bourey from Yale for this work.

Source and Quick Start downloads are available on the uPortal All Release
page. The generated Maven site which includes JavaDocs and other
interesting is available as well: http://developer.ja-sig.org/projects/uportal/3.0.0-RC2/

This Release Candidate is Feature Complete. At this point the only
changes that will be made before a General Audience release are bug
fixes. I would encourage everyone to try the release and please file
bugs that you find in the JA-SIG Issue Tracker

I want to thank everyone who contributed to the development both
directly and in-directly. Having this developer community available for
both code and design insight has been invaluable.

uPortal 3.0.0 Release Engineer,

-Eric Dalquist