The Developer Wing Gone Mad!

Hello All,

It’s been a few days since my last post… I was on vacation for a few days. Visited the beautiful Island of Holbox. I know… WHERE?! Here’s a site that talks a bit about Holbox: http://www.holboxisland.com/. Wow, what an interesting place & what a journey to arrive. I’m currently in Mexico City, so my girlfriend Gabi and I had a 2 hour flight to Cancun, then a 2 hour drive by taxi through a number of small, small towns… then a 30 minute ferry ride on a very small ferry to the Island!

So, no cars, not many telephones or Televisions… just us, the beach, Casa Sandra (our beautiful resort), the ocean and the 2000 mexican people that live there! Very refreshing place to visit for a vacation from everything! The only way to get around “town” is by golf cart… as mentioned earlier no cars so that is pretty cool! A bit of a difference than the 23 million people here in Mexico City… lol.

I guess I wasn’t totally without technology… for my days on the beach, I had my Rum and Coke in one hand and a really great book in the other hand. The book is called Google Story and it focuses on how Google came to be the powerhouse Tech company they are today… as well as some bumps along the road for them. I strongly recommend it to anyone who has their own IT company. We can learn a lot from how Sergei Brin and Larry Page built Google from the ground up…

Anyway, enough technology talk Here are a couple pictures of the beach in Holbox. If anyone wants a place to lay around for a couple days on a beautiful beach, check it out! If you are looking for a place with lots of things to do… don’t bother! haha ENJOY THE PHOTOS!

Cheers… thank you Holbox!

Adrian

A Web Content Management System is a type of Content management system (CMS) software used for managing websites.

The software manages content (text, graphics, links, etc.) for distribution on a web server. Usually the software provides tools where users with little or no knowledge of programming languages and markup languages (such as HTML) can create and manage content with relative ease of use. Most systems use a database to hold content, and a presentation layer displays the content to regular website visitors based on a set of templates. Management of the software is typically done through a web browser, but some systems may be modified in other ways.

Ok, sounds simple right? Not always the case… or so it seems with OpenSource tools for providing these features to clients. Our company, Evolving Solutions has been building CMS systems for some time now and we’ve been looking for an OpenSource CMS solution that might help us and speed up development time… which in turn lets us get more work done and also charge our clients less! a win-win situation.

So, after many attempts at searching, I’ve found that most CMS systems are just way to confusing for everyday users… the users that are going to be updating their sites, everyday

I decided to look around again a couple weeks ago and I found MeshCMS I read about the OpenSource project on another site and decided to check it out. I wasn’t really excited when I saw the project homepage… I honestly think that they could update it maybe and make it a little catchier since they say that the site is running off MeshCMS. Just my humble opinion.

Anyway, I didn’t judge a book by it’s cover and I decided to give it a shot. Here are a few key points to what I’ve found out so far:

• I was pleasantly surprised at first how easy it was to setup… real easy… you just deploy it as a webapp if you are using Tomcat or any other Servlet Container and it’s ready to rock! Refreshing start.




• No database required for MeshCMS. It’s all file driven (templates and JSP’s), could be good, good be bad I guess, all depends on what you prefer. But eliminates one step of the setup (creating a DB)




• All theme/template based. So basically you can set up a theme really easy, here’s a quick glimpse if you are curious on simple it really is: http://www.meshcms.org/userguide/index.html#create_theme. Anyone familiar with JSP’s and Tag Libraries will appreciate how easy it is to setup a Theme.




• Extremely user friendly for the end user (which is most important!).

Now, someone looking for a more robust, permission based, blah blah type of Document/CMS system will not be interested in MeshCMS. It’s definitely more for someone or some company looking to get a CMS system up and running smoothly and quickly. They even state it on their website:

MeshCMS has been thought as a quick tool to edit pages online, manage files and create some common components like menus, breadcrumbs, mail forms, image galleries and so on.

So, in conclusion, I haven’t had a chance to dive in and really use MeshCMS for a production website yet (just being honest, hopefully will soon), but if you are in the market for an easy to use and easy to setup CMS System, I would recommend looking at the features and trying it out for yourself. It’ll only take a few minutes and it’ll be well worth it!

If anyone has used it or tried it out and has any suggestions or comments, please feel free to share!

Good luck, happy CMS’n!
Adrian

Has you ever looked for an easy way to add searching capabilities to your web site or application?

For some reason when I started looking a year ago I didn’t have much luck. I was fairly familiar with an Apache Product named Lucene (probably one of my favorite product names ever… I just love how it sounds), but it really didn’t seem to work well with web applications. It seems much more useful to search documents (word docs, text, pdf, etc) and index them for a search. A very useful tool for a company portal, but not for a website that is built with dynamic content or has jsp includes.

Then I stumbled across another Apache Project named Nutch (pretty neat name also).

Nutch is open source web-search software. It builds on Lucene Java, adding web-specifics, such as a crawler, a link-graph database, parsers for HTML and other document formats, etc.

In a nutshell, that means you can search your website or application with Lucene Probably may not be really useful for smaller sites, but some of our applications have around 100 pages of content so users always appreciate a search option. Nutch is still in the early stages but we have used it a few times and it seems very solid already. The crawling part can be a bit confusing if you have to setup CYGWIN on your Windows OS for the first time. But once that step is completed and you index a few sites it becomes pretty easy. As with most Open Source tools, the documentation is a bit tricky but give it a shot if you need to integrate search capabilities into your applications!

Here are a couple examples of sites that use Nutch:

OfficeGateway
More of a basic implementation for searching the website for information.

Krugle
A more in depth implementation that searches thousands (guessing) of files when you enter a search criteria.

Searching may not seem to important to some, but it seems to come up quite a bit in our projects… so I guess it might just be important after all! Check out Nutch if you need to find a solid search feature today!

Cheers,
Adrian

Hey,

Just a quick post this evening on a couple tools that have become part of my daily life. The are OpenOffice.org and Mozilla products (mainly Firefox Browser and Thunderbird Email Client). I just started using both Firefox (for browsing) and Thunderbird for my Email client about a year ago. I’m a very big advocate of Open Source so I felt obligated to give them a try. Sure glad I did.

I’ve become extremely comfortable and happy with both applications. Firefox was a refreshing change for me to browse the Internet (I won’t mention any other names of browsers here that don’t work very well… that seem clunky… and that have the initials IE). Right away I setup Firefox and my default browser and haven’t looked back! I love the multiple tabs options… I find it faster and it’s more secure. All great features. While on the browser topic, another alternative that seems pretty solid, although I haven’t tested it out too much is Opera. Opera is similar to Mozilla… it appears as though they have some neat products on the go… and a great looking website!

Thunderbird is an easy to install email client application that seems as solid as any others I have seen. It’s got a great plugin interface, so you can download plugins from the open source world and include them in your application (calendars, signatures etc etc). Here’s the link to find more from the community. Definitely worth looking at, even just to see what’s out there. You can also download some cool plugins for Firefox here.

OpenOffice… is comparable to Microsoft Office. It has a number of applications included in the suite including OpenOffice Writer (Word Processor), OpenOffice Calc (Spreadsheet Application), Impress (to create PowerPoint presentations) not to mention a number of other applications. I would recommend OpenOffice to any business owner who likes to use free software, that works NO Licensing fees… no setup fees… just go to the site, download it, install it and start using it! How refreshing! I still don’t believe that many people in the business world know about OpenOffice. We at Evolving Solutions are trying to promote is much as possible and hopefully over time we can help make a difference and get people on board using it! So, feel free to check it out.. download it and try it out. If you don’t like it, you can always keep paying licensing fees for other software that doesn’t work that great .

So, no real technical talk tonight in this post… just me recommending some software that might help you and your business in the long run. The best thing about them both is you can try them out for free, if you don’t like them (which I would be very surprised) you can simply remove them from your computer and carry on.

Cheers,
Adrian

Have you ever had a co-worker/colleague/boss ask you “Hey, How hard would it be to have that report in PDF for our software system?”

If so, maybe you’ve felt like I used too… “Well… umm… I think it’s possible… probably not to hard, but could be difficult… do we really need that?” (My business partner heard that one a few times)

That was my answer for awhile… until I discovered a great Open Source project named iText

iText is a very simple Java package that is very easy to install and use within your applications. We had a requirement to actually create a very dynamic web application that could create bookmarks and cards to hand out with pictures of people on them and text under the pictures… all lined up perfectly for different layouts… yada yada yada. We decided to go with iText to create PDF files to print the information that needed to be dynamically entered and captured since PDF’s seem to print much better than trying to print directly from HTML pages.

You may have similar requirements for a project, if so I strongly recommend checking out iText. All you have to do to set it up is download the jar file and include it in your classpath. Then the next step I would recommend is visiting the Examples page and going through most or all of the code examples to get comfortable with the code and how it works! Nothing helps understand a product more than solid examples and there are plenty of them there.

Another very helpful link is that to the actual API for iText. Once you become more familiar with how the package works, you’ll want to dive into the API for even more information and methods.

iText seems like a very solid Project that’s been around for awhile. The mailing list is supported very nicely with a number of users currently subscribed. I’ve also included a link here to a number of books that might help even more if you really want to learn how to create dynamic PDF’s within your applications. Click here to view books from Amazon.

As a developer I think this is very important package to look into. I think just about every application we develop could use some sort of PDF creation for reports, calendars and even bookmarks!

Thanks for dropping in, keep on developing in the open source world!!!

Adrian

RSS Feeds... making big news these days! Most will know what they are but if not here is a quick explanation of what they consist of:

RSS is a family of web feed formats, specified in XML and used for Web syndication. RSS is used by (among other things) news Web sites, weblogs and podcasting. The abbreviation is variously used to refer to the following standards:

• Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
• Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
• RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)

We've been talking a lot lately at our company about RSS Feeds. Our product OfficeGateway has an RSS Reader for users and it's becoming quite popular. Everyday, the first thing I do (as a user of OfficeGateway) is login and read my favorite feeds from many different news sites, blogs, etc. We are always looking for better/easier ways to integrate new technology with our software products and I was able to find another great JSP Tag Library. The name of it is RSS Utilities and it was developed by By Rodrigo Oliveira of Sun. Thanks Rodrigo, you did a great job.

It's basically the same as implementing the Mailer Tag Library that I posted about earlier. 3 simple steps to get rss feeds reading into your applications:

After you have the 3 steps completed (and the jar file included in your classpath) that's it! Start reading in Feeds from anywhere. Very easy to integrate with applications. The tag library has a number of useful properties that can be set to customize your feeds.

Here is a link if you would like to view the tutorial from Sun and I've also included a link here to a resource if anyone is interested in investigating RSS Feeds further!

Best of luck with RSS feeds, it's definitely going to be a big part of the future on the Internet!

And oh yeah! If anyone would like to include my blog in their RSS feeds, please feel free. Here is the link http://www.evolvingsolutions.ca/devwing/?feed=rss2

Thanks,
Adrian

PS: Thanks goes out to Amit Gupta for his WordPress plugin for including code within your Posts (as seen above). Anyone interested in looking at his plugin (iG:Syntax Hiliter - seemed to work better than most for me) feel free to visit his blog and download it here.

Anyone that has researched Open Source Portal Servers will recognize tonights post on Liferay Portal Server.

About 2 years ago our company started researching Portal Software and at first we found that most of it was very expensive and not very friendly to work with.  We were trying to find a portal server to develop our business idea... which later became know as OfficeGateway.

We had an idea to build an online collaboration tool for Small and Medium sized businesses.  A place for shared calendars... document sharing... CRM... etc.  As mentioned above we spent sometime researching a few commercial portal servers - won't mention any names here ... and late one night we stumbled upon Liferay.  We tested it out that night (over a couple beverages)... and found that it was very easy to download and setup, it actually came bundled with Tomcat so it took about 10 minutes to get it up and running.  We were amazed to see when we logged in that the user interface was actually quite easy to follow and there were a number of pre-configured "portlets" available to use with the product.  Oh, and probably the biggest point about the software is that it's ABSOLUTELY FREE TO USE AND IT'S OPEN SOURCE!

We decided to check out a couple other portal servers, but we always seemed to come back to Liferay.  So, we moved ahead with Liferay Portal Server and began developing/integrating out own Portlets within it.  After a couple of months of tweaking here and there, we had our Business Collaboration Portal ready... OfficeGateway was launched!  Please visit OfficeGateway to find out more about the product if you are interested in using it with your company and/or reselling it.

More on Liferay: to steal a quote from their site that I think sums up why developers should look into it as a possible portal solution:

Companies routinely choose Liferay Portal for its out-of-the-box functionality, compatibility across all major application servers and database platforms, scalability, and the relentless innovation of its development team.

I think that sentence couldn't sum it up better.  Feel free to visit their site for a demo.  The software has come a long way since day 1.  The interface has improved immensely (the look and feel and number of themes, etc), I believe the API has been improved with each version and it also has AJAX integrated into it now.  Take a look at the demo, you won't be disappointed.  There is a lot of other information on their site as well, and also a nice story on OfficeGateway and some other case studies on the site.  Check them out to learn more on how Liferay Portal Server has been integrated over the years!  If anyone is interested or has any questions regarding Liferay don't hesitate to post a comment or contact me directly.

Cheers,

Adrian