The Developer Wing Gone Mad!

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

My business partner and brother introduced me to an interesting new WEB 2.0 application a couple weeks ago.  The name Krugle.  At first I was skeptical when I went and looked at the beta version that stated "Welcome to krugle - your place to find code and technical content"

It seemed to good to be true for a developer like myself who is searching for examples and resources many times a day (as posted earlier).  Krugle wasn't quite released when my brother mentioned for me to check it out a few weeks ago (you can read his blog here if you are interested in business ideas, cool software, etc).  I looked around and it sounded like a "neat" idea.  I decided to go back and take a look a couple days.... WOW, does this thing appear to be useful!  The application is nice and easy to use (which is sometimes rare these days).  You have 3 main options for searching:

1. Code
2. Tech Pages
3. Projects

I've been testing it out for a day or 2 now and it seems very interesting so far.  I've mostly been looking at the Code and Tech Page tabs and it's bringing back some very accurate search results.  Another great feature of Krugle is that you can do multiple searches and it opens a new tab for you each time so you don't lose your previous searches (unlike Google, hint hint).

I thought for sure that Google was the best tool for searching for code on such technologies as AJAX, Java, Web Services, etc... but Krugle may be above and beyond Google (appears to be at this point to me, but time will tell I guess).  I would recommend anyone that searches for code on a regular basis give Krugle a Test Drive.  Even just test it out a couple times and you might be surprised.  When you find results for code, it displays the code properly formatted in a special window (that is easy to copy and paste from) and also gives you the option to "Save As..." so you can save the file to your desktop.

Very impressive Krugle! Great start to what will hopefully be a great breakthrough in the future... and oh yeah, thanks for sending it on brother!

Cheers,

Adrian

Hey Everyone,

As I wrote in an earlier post about JSTL tag libraries and how nice it was to learn and start using them, I've also began using another custom JSP tag library that is provided as part of the Apache Jakarta Project. If you aren't familiar with it and you are a Java Developer, I would highly recommend getting used to it. Lots of open source projects that are very useful and "usually" easy to setup and use within your applications. One example from there is the Jakarta Mailer Tag library. It's a very easy to implement tag library that you can use to send emails from within your application in a few simple steps. All documentation is located here if you would like to read more about the tags.

Here are the 3 main steps to setting up the Jakarta Mailer Tag Library on a JSP page to simply send an email:

• Add the following Tag Library line to the top of your JSP:

• Add the following information to your web.xml file so your application can use the Tag Library:

• And last but not least, use the tags in your JSP content like so to send a simple email:

And that is it! 3 simple steps... If you would like more documentation visit the documentation link for more on this and all the options for sending email using the Jakarta Mailer Tag Library! I hope this information helps, I know for me it used to be a lot more difficult to send emails within our applications before I was introduced to this Custom Tag Library from Jakarta. Best of luck.

Cheers,

Adrian

Hello  Developers and Amigos!

Tonight I'm going to blog about one of the hottest topics out there... AJAX. I know most are probably sick of hearing about it, but I've been working on a new AJAX application (a shopping cart) for the past 5 hours and I'm still questioning a few things here...

1. What the heck am I doing and how did I get here?
2. Is this really a better solution?
3. Where should I use it and where should I not use it?

I am still relatively knew to the whole AJAX world. I have my text book that I bought for 40 bucks (Canadian Dollars - I'll put a link at the bottom for the same book). I won't go into to many details on how AJAX works, but basically it the acronym stands for

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML

So as you can guess it mostly involves JavaScript, Document Object Model (DOM) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). If you have an understanding of these technologies I think it's pretty straight forward to learn AJAX. For me the hardest part has been putting it all together and trying to decide where to use and where not to. I guess (and I am hoping) that this will improve over time. I found myself debating a few different ways to build my shopping cart and because AJAX is so new it's very hard to find a lot of valuable information on it, besides the odd helloworld application.

As the technologies evolve, I think it will become easier to use. There are already some JSP Tag Libraries out there just for AJAX. Here is a link to one that looks pretty impressive although I didn't have the time to check it out too much:

http://ajaxpatterns.org/Java_Ajax_Frameworks#AJAX_JSP_Tag_Library

If anyone has tried it or has any suggestions please share.

I won't go into too much more detail about AJAX right now. I guess for me it's been a bit of a learning curve to figure out how everything interacts, but it's coming along... I promise you that work with me So... if you have the patience to try it out, I would definitely recommend it since it's a very hot technology and I don't think it's going away anytime soon! Wish me luck on my shopping cart journey, all the best to you that decide to test it out. Here are some useful links that might help you get going (I'm throwing in a WEB 2.0 wiki link because it has a lot of good examples of AJAX applications):

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2EE/AJAX/
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/j-ajax1/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

Also, as promised a link to the book that I started with (below). I find it great because there's really not much for theory, just a lot of examples to get you going quickly (I see it's cheaper now to, bonus).

AJAX Hacks - Bruce Perry

Simple post tonight: A product that could possibly save you and your development teams life. SourceJammer is the name, get to know it. Our team was looking for a Source Code Version Control system (sharing files, checkin-checkout files, etc) for months and for some reason there just isn't much out there -- Or at least what we could find. We tried setting up some but had a lot of difficulty in getting them up and running. Then we came across SourceJammer (www.sourcejammer.org). For a Java Development team, this product is a dream come true (and it's OPEN SOURCE also!). It's basically a Java Webapp that can run on any Application Server (ie: Tomcat). It can be setup fairly easy also and there is a small client application that users have to install on their machines to connect to it. Once setup, it's easy to backup, version, share files within your development team.

Thank you SourceJammer -- thank you Rob MacGrogan and your team! Rob MacGrogan is the lead and primary developer of SourceJammer. He came up with the original idea, wrote most of the code, did most of the maintenance, has served as team lead, and has basically kept the project going.

-- Adrian

Sitting back this Father's Day morning, sipping on a nice Mexican Java thinking about a small application I worked on last week. I recently started using Java's JSTL tag libraries for most of our applications. Basically they are a set of tags that make your life easier as a developer. The homepage from sun is located here: http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/jstl/ A short description from that Sun page describes the tags:

"JSTL has support for common, structural tasks such as iteration and conditionals, tags for manipulating XML documents, internationalization tags, and SQL tags."

Anyway familiar with Java Tag Libraries for JSP's will likely find these packages interesting and useful. For me, I find it's nice and eliminates some of the code that is sometimes used for building a webapp that connects to a Database, display information, has forms, etc. I've included a couple links to some examples of how the tags can be used below. Once you get familiar with how to set them up and get them running, it's best just to start playing around with them and looking at other examples. Here are some links, I hope this is useful for some.

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/java-standard-tag-library
http://www.developer.com/java/ejb/article.php/1447551

Cheers!

-- Adrian

Hello Everyone,

I was sitting back today as I setup my new blog trying to think about what to write about first. Thought about recommending some sites that have links to open source projects. Not real exciting. I'll probably talk about many of them listed in the future so that would kinda defeat the purpose of the blog also. Then I realized the perfect opening post... must talk about Word Press!

Word Press is the blogging software application that this blog is installed on. It was recommended by a friend a few weeks ago and he said it was "very easy to setup". He wasn't joking. It honestly took about 5 minutes to setup! It's written in PHP and the instructions are very easy to set it up. You basically need a database (MySQL recommended) and a webserver that can host PHP applications. Basically it's very easy to setup 1 or multiple blogs off the same system/database. I won't explain too much more about, but feel free to visit their site: http://www.wordpress.com/ a must read for anyone interested in setting up a blog and they actually will even host your own domain if you aren't capable of setting one up on your own. For people interested in reading more of the technical jargon or downloading the application you'll want to visit the following link: http://www.wordpress.org Much information on how to install, plugins, support, examples, etc.

Word Press makes blogging easy and exciting. It's open source, so you can use it for free with no obligations. Thank you Word Press, and we'll see you in the blogging world!

--Adrian