Signet Working Group conference call
May 12, 2006

*Attendees*
Lynn McRae, Stanford U. (chair)
Dave Donnelly, Stanford U.
Gary Brown, U. Bristol
Joy Veronneau, Cornell U.
Steve Olshansky, Internet2
Jessica Bibbee, Internet2 (scribe)

Carry Over *Action Items*
[AI] Contact {Lynn} if you identify additional functional requirements for your local project. (28-Apr)
[AI] {Bob} will send .htaccess local syntax to the group via the list.
[AI] {Tom} will send a few brief Signet case studies to the group via the list.
[AI] {Group} will develop use cases for Signet.
[AI] {Jennifer} will solicit on site feedback from UC Davis about the UI demo/mock up.
[AI] {Minh} will develop a list of requirements for how Signet will interface with LDAP and Grouper.
[AI] {Tom, Jennifer, and Gary Brown} will discuss the modularity of Signet's UI and the internationalization of code for Grouper and Signet. There will be a separate call for this item.
[AI] {Lynn} will write up a person and function summary to express the relationship of privileges to roles and to determine what gets expressed in the eduPerson entitlement space.

*Discussion*
Cornell has formally joined as a Signet Early Adopter. They will be contributing code, especially regarding the notification area.

{Dave} has been working on installation and customization aspects of Signet, as well as extension and resource, and has written a document describing the specifics of resource utilization (cf. 11-May.) There are four main categories for resources:
- Application-specific initialization and configuration information (CFG)
- Diagnostic, logging, and/or debugging messages (MSG)
- Presentation layer (user interface) text, graphics (UI)
- Database-specific data, e.g. JDBC/SQL, Hibernate/SQL (SQL)

{Dave} would like to design for an implementation with a default set of resources in the distribution jar file, which would allow one to create their own resource override file to change only the desired resources.

{Gary} shared his insight into how Grouper handles resources – one resource bundle contains default items, while a second contains custom. Varying languages present another challenge, and the developers hope to support multiple languages, thereby allowing the users to choose a version (e.g., French or English.) He also spoke about the Grouper mailer demo, which has an extra component for language and region. He noted that when customizing, it is important to use an overlay, as opposed to an override – this ensures that any new changes will show through, without being lost.

{Lynn} suggested an instance where one might switch between 2 JSPs, and introduce a control for search and browse. He mentioned looking at subdividing the JSP into text, graphics, and templates.

Signet will not offer a binary distribution, but instead will introduce a source distribution with Ant tasks. Not only will this ease the installation, but it will also enable the merging of site-specific code for integration. For example, database properties (providing values for setting hibernate and source setting file), local style sheet, and text and resources merging.

The next Signet WG conference call will be on Friday, May 26, 2006 at 11am EDT.