contentcentric.org

Fisheye Server

2008-11-22T07:53:03Z

One of the benefits of having our own dedicated SVN servers is that we have been able to set up a Fisheye server at http://svn.liferay.com. We tried to set up Fisheye against our Sourceforge.net servers, but because of the size of our repository and remote connection we could never get the initial index to complete.

We've also set up the Fisheye plugin for JIRA so that you can view the changelog associated with every issue.

A big thank you to Atlassian for granting us open source licenses.

What makes a sexy demo

2008-11-21T16:04:17Z

I am finally going over my jboye08 notes and I found my scribbles from the Web Idol competition. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this event, each vendor gets seven minutes to demonstrate their product. "Celebrity" judges put in their quips (á la American Idol) and the audience votes on what product they like the most. In addition to being entertaining, the event gives insight into what the vendors think are their coolest features (they can't show everything in 7 minutes) and what the audience responds to. Here is what the vendors demonstrated this year (in order of their appearance).

Sitecore showed:

incontext editing
their "site builder" functionality
multi-device preview
their ribbon tool bars
building a slide show

SDL Tridion showed:

incontext editing
integrating translation into workflow
emailing groups
a Forester chart

Hippo showed:

dashboard plugins
drag and drop WYSIWYG control (e.g. dragging a URL onto a piece of text to create a link)
associating content

eZ Systems showed:

contributing content from MS Word
browse to edit
creating a picture gallery
community rating

e-Spirit showed:

database integration through the administrative UI

This year Sitecore won first place and Hippo came in second. Interestingly, reigning champion eZ Systems did not show all the video functionality which helped them win last year. The audience seemed to be the most attracted to clean user interfaces that looked simple to use. Advanced functionality like sophisticated workflow and database integration were less compelling. While an event like Web Idol does not translate into a software selection, I think this result reenforces the importance of simplicity and ease of use in a demo. Power, range, and flexibility gets a product onto a short list but simplicity is what business users find sexy (at least as far as software demos go). If you are running a CMS selection, this means that you need to make sure that all of the products that demo to your selection team meet your core functional and non-functional requirements.

Migrating SVN servers for committers

2008-11-21T03:37:01Z

The number of committers to our SVN repository and the sheer amount of activity have both skyrocketed this past year. Sun now has over 25 active contributors and Liferay, Inc. has been hiring key developers from all over the world as well. While that means increased productivity overall, it also means that SVN responsiveness is now much more important than it used to be.

SourceForge's SVN services served us well for many years, but now it's time we had our own SVN hardware.

As of yesterday, all SVN write access to SourceForge has been turned off. Committers must now commit to a new SVN repository which will have its changes pushed to SourceForge. That means SourceForge will continue to serve as our public mirror, but committers will have to use another URL.

So if you're a committer and wondered why your commit access stopped working, do this:

svn switch --relocate https://lportal.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/lportal svn://svn.liferay.com/repos/public

Your login will no longer by your SourceForge account, but will now be your www.liferay.com screen name and password. Just log into www.liferay.com and on log in, your credentials will automatically be propagated to our SVN server.

And don't worry about your WOL or Ohloh stats. We'll be syncing the SVN author names for everyone.

For those who just want read access to our code, please continue to check it out on SF.net. It'll usually be 10-20 minutes delayed since we use another application called SVK to sync our SVN repositories.

Is this site running Liferay?

2008-11-21T02:42:18Z

It's been a while, but trust me, we've been working like crazy to get 5.2 out for your using pleasure.

But, I arrive with a bit of a gift, especially for the marketing folks (or anyone curious). Have you ever wondered if a website was running Liferay?

Well guess no more. I've written a Greasemonkey script that will tell you if a website is running Liferay or not. What's Greasemonkey you ask?
Only about the absolute coolest extension for Firefox known to man (yes it requires Firefox).

So what do you do?

If you have Greasemonkey installed, you should just skip to Step 3.

Step 1: Go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

Step 2: Click the Add to Firefox button, and install the plugin. It will notify you to restart firefox.

Step 3: Once you've restarted, go here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/37259

Step 4: Press the Install button at the upper right

Step 5: Agree to the install

Step 6: Visit a website (like http://liferay.com)

Step 7: Enjoy the info:

And that's it. You can hide the display (and it will popup on every page load, or you can hide it for the domain, which will hide it for 1 year. If you want it to show up again, just clear your cookies, and it will popup again for any domain you have hidden it for.

Enjoi!

[video] eXo ECM 2.2 preview

2008-11-21T00:17:39Z

The last new developments around eXo Enterpise Content Management:

- Advanced drag and drop
- Thumbnails
- Coverflow
- Keyboard support for multi selection

and many more…

eXo ECM 2.2 preview from Benjamin Mestrallet on Vimeo.

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links for 2008-11-19

2008-11-20T00:38:06Z

paulcwarren

2008-11-20T00:14:40Z

Jason over at Bluefish has written an excellent introductory article to Composer. If you are new to Composer and would like to understand a little bit more about it this is well worth a read.

eXo Knowledge Suite online demo

2008-11-20T00:10:23Z

Our latest product eXo Knowledge Suite has just reached its demo server.

eXo Knowledge Suite (KS) is currently composed of two applications : a FAQ manager and a Forums system. In an earlier post, we covered the features of these applications. For the impatients, you can get a quick overview on the take a tour page.

As usual, we leveraged eXo Portal and eXo JCR to build a consistent and powerful product that fits perfectly within the eXo products stack. KS can run on top of eXo Portal and eXo WebOS.

So, you wanted more participation in your portal ? FAQ and Forum will help you wonderfully to reinforce collaboration and forge knowledge.

eXo KS is publicly available for download on OW2 forge and the online demo is waiting for you at:

http://ks.demo.exoplatform.org

For any question or feedback, we will be happy to hear from you at ks@exoplatform.com.

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paulcwarren

2008-11-19T23:48:47Z

Please welcome friend and colleague Don Robertson to the [EMC/ECM] blogosphere. As well as residing as overall architect on Composer, Don is also the author of smart containers and knows just a little about BOF. If Don doesn’t know it, pretty much no one will. Don has been blogging internally and has bootstrapped his public blog with a few of his internal posts. Highly recommended.

Enter Content Here in Alltop

2008-11-19T21:04:28Z

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

I should mention that being listed top center in Alltop Content Management isn't too bad on the ego either. Thanks to whomever put Enter Content Here there.

Fierce Content Management lists Enter Content Here in its top 10!

2008-11-19T20:57:23Z

Fierce Content Management just named Enter Content Here in its top 10 list of content management websites. The rest of the list is:

Here is how Enter Content Here was described:

This site offers a more technical perspective on content management than you get from the other sites on this list. Author Seth Gottlieb is an industry consultant who helps clients implement enterprise content management solutions. In addition to the free blog, he sells in-depth reports analyzing different content management packages.

Being mentioned in this group is a true honor and I am grateful for the consideration.

OCLC’S WebJunction Creates Online Learning Community for Librarians

2008-11-19T15:44:02Z

"Launched in 2003 by OCLC, a nonprofit library service and research organization, in collaboration with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and key partners across the library community, WebJunction set out to build a community where library staff and affiliated organizations can meet to share ideas, solve problems and take courses. The WebJunction community has since grown rapidly to include more than 32,000 registered members, 90,000 unique monthly visitors, 30,000 courses taken, and partnerships with a growing number of library organizations...

...The initiative required systems that would interact well together to provide a robust community experience, including features that would allow for group spaces and a way for individuals to add content to the site. The systems also had to integrate with OCLC’s ecommerce solution for payment processing, as well as WebJunction’s own social functionality and content management tools built using Liferay, a leading open source enterprise portal solution."

Read the full press release.

Struggling publishers continuing their investments in digital

2008-11-19T14:51:07Z

The venerable PCMag is discontinuing its print edition - the most recent in a long string of similar announcements from other publishers. I am seeing a consistent trend in my media and publishing client base. While their overall businesses are struggling, they realize that they cannot afford to stop investing in online publishing. Instead, they are cutting back in their editorial departments and even discontinuing their print editions in order to sustain their online investment (which accounts for an increasing percentage of their revenue as advertising dollars move online).

This has been going on for a long time. Early in 2008, there was an article in the New York times that said that newspapers are reducing their traveling campaign coverage. Paper magazines have steadily been shrinking or disappearing entirely from news stand shelves. Still online investment appears to be steady. In fact, one of my clients recently sent out a letter to creditors excusing delayed payments because of a cash flow problem and they still have the go ahead for a new WCMS deployment.

This is an interesting time to be in digital publishing as companies are investing to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of their digital channels. Some companies are being deliberate and methodical in their digital strategy. Others are aggressively (and desperately) experimenting with lots of ideas hoping one will turn out to be a winner. One thing I am not seeing is digital strategies that look beyond banner advertising sales. Today's strategies are still focused on driving traffic and seeking the best CPMs. I am a little concerned about the future viability of traditional banner advertising as content becomes increasingly consumed on alternative (banner unfriendly) platforms and "banner blindness" spreads to the larger online audience. However, I do think that until that new content business model emerges, the best thing an online publisher can do is continue to invest in creating a great digital product that attracts a loyal audience.

Gartner Recognizes Liferay's Accomplishments in Horizontal Portal and Social Software

2008-11-19T08:31:25Z

Some of you may have been following our developments with the analyst community, particularly Gartner and their 2008 Magic Quadrant reports. For those of that haven't, Liferay was recently recognized in two Magic Quadrants:

"Horizontal Portal Products," where Liferay was named a Visionary for its Liferay Portal product
"Social Software," which covered Liferay Collaboration Suite and the forthcoming Social Office product

You can see what the Google-sphere thinks about these results with the links above. For our part, it's an interesting development. On the one hand, as an open source vendor we're not used to getting attention from the traditional analysts (though to be fair Gartner mentioned us in last year's report and Forrester had a research note including Liferay and Jetspeed as early as 2003), who tend to provide research to the kinds of organizations that have been wary of adopting open source software. Technology decisions at these organizations are usually made by higher-level decision makers—CIOs and CTOs or even business side decision makers. For this audience, the traditional software sales model has been the dominant acquisition process, including heavy solicitation from large vendors like IBM and Oracle, research from analysts, and perhaps most importantly, the fear of making a bad decision (and the "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" mentality).

On the other hand, we've recognized for some time that since open source is a fundamental shift in the way software is developed, distributed and maintained, analysts seeking to stay relevant would need to address the phenomenon as a legitimate dimension of their market research sooner or later. And they did: at Gartner's Portals, Content, and Collaboration Summit in Baltimore earlier this year, the keynote recognized five significant technologies that are changing the IT landscape:

software as a service (SaaS)
global-class computing
the consumerization of IT
Web 2.0
open source

It's interesting to note that at least four of the five affect, relate to, or are being addressed by Liferay in some way:

SaaS is a legitimate business model that we'll be implementing in the near future with our Social Office product. A compelling, reliable solution for collaboration (whether intranet or across enterprise boundaries) on a subscription/hosted basis will be a welcome alternative for many companies who don't want to deal with the hassle of maintaining these sites in-house.
Consumerization of IT: Google, Facebook, and Apple have really pushed the envelope with respect to usability and simplicity, and they constantly inspire us and challenge us to make our software more intuitive.
Web 2.0: collaboration is at the heart of the traditional portal use case, and we think Liferay is getting it right where the other kludgy and expensive proprietary offerings are limping along
Open source: Liferay is the most liberal commercial open source vendor out there.

One of the interesting dynamics we encountered while being considered for the Magic Quadrant reports was how to define qualifying criteria. I think it's something that we will continue to wrestle with over time: how do you measure the ability to execute of an open source vendor vs. a proprietary one? We don't have the traditional limitations (huge sales and acquisition costs, lack of a viral distribution model) of a proprietary vendor, and we work with a distributed community for product development and maintenance. So our size (much smaller than IBM) belies our ability to create great software and successfully deploy it to enterprise environments. To add to the complexity, our relationship with Sun Microsystems, through which 40 of their engineers actively contribute features and fixes to our code base, adds a another layer of nuance.

Whatever the outcome, we welcome the coverage. Liferay's installed base includes an incredible roster of the world's most successful enterprises, including Allianz, AutoZone, Benetton, BMW, Bosch, Cisco Systems, Lufthansa Flight Training, and O2, but our advocates at these organizations have often been technology pioneers that understand open source ROI. There are still a lot of Global 2000 companies who take a more cautious approach to technology and who need to be educated about the open choices they have. These companies need to know that the $125,000 per processor they're spending on Oracle WebCenter Suite (list price as of June 2008) is a huge misallocation of IT dollars that can be re-invested instead into building innovative extensions to open source solutions. They need to know open alternatives exist, and if the Magic Quadrant is their tool of choice, more power to them.

Finally, Liferay's placement in the MQ brings added strength to our customer acquisition process. We have always had enthusiastic developers, architects, and technologists in our community, grassroots advocates who vouch for us and evangelize Liferay to their management. Some have been able to convince management to go open source, but others have faced resistance. Now, when those decision makers hear the rave reviews from their teams about Liferay but get cold feet about adopting an unknown technology, they can turn to their trusted sources, such as the MQ, to validate what their developers already knew.

Liferay Recognized as Social Context Provider for Enterprises

2008-11-19T08:03:51Z

In a recent blog, Ross Dawson, CEO of Advanced Human Technologies, notes Liferay is identified by Gartner as a viable solution for bringing social computing into the enterprise. Ross also shares several key observations made by David Cearley at the Gartner Symposium in Sydney:

Social context - such as reviews, ratings, and feedback - can deliver high value. The gestation period has been from the beginning of this decade, but we are reaching an inflexion point and are moving into a phase of accelerated development.
This will impact the enterprise as customers and stakeholders are involved, meaning there isn't a choice as to whether you're involved. It also can be applied inside the enterprise.
Company websites will increasingly have social elements. Competitors will engage in social networks, and there is the potential for first-mover advantage.
We are at the beginning of a 5-10 year transition. Any digital immigrant that does not fully assimilate will experience significant personal and career challenges.

Fun with annotations in Groovy/Griffon

2008-11-19T06:14:55Z

The 1.6 version of Groovy seems to have full-fledged annotation support.

I took the occasion to finally learn to create some annotations on my own, and wrote an annotation which can be used in a Griffon model to give the controller some hints about how to best display its data.

I might have taken this a little bit too far, but it is also possible to declare strings in annotations which can later be evaluated.

Take this annotation as an example:


package annotations

import java.lang.annotation.*

@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface TableModelInformation {
   boolean displayed() default true
   String displayName() default ""
   String displayValue() default ""
}

This can be used in the model like this:


...
    @TableModelInformation(displayValue='"Total Subprocesses: ${object.subprocesses.size()}"')
    List subprocesses = []
...

(Note the weird string syntax: only double quotes (i.e. GString) are rightfully not interpreted as Strings. Furthermore it expects to receive an instance of the object in a variable named (tadaaa) "object".

This can be evaluated later in the controller:


return new GroovyShell(new Binding([object:object])).evaluate(object.class.getDeclaredField(field).getAnnotation(annotations.TableModelInformation).displayValue())

("object" and "field" are available in the context of the controller)

I am not sure how to optimize this code, especially the verbosity of annotation retrieval. It nevertheless is kind of funny to see groovy behavior in an (at least from me) unexpected way...

paulcwarren

2008-11-18T19:38:14Z

As I said in my opening post on the subject Composer isn’t just an application. It isn’t just a DAB/DAI replacement. It is a lot more than that. And its existence, I think, could be of great importance to Documentum and enterprise content management in general.

To understand the potential impact of this new tooling platform I want to look at the games industry and the effect their tools have had. And then examine parallels that might exist with enterprise content management and games industries.

Back in the late 70s, early 80s when personal computer capacity was small and games were simple, individuals (probably in their bedrooms) were able to design and build games all by themselves using just the operating system and knowledge of the machines’ instruction sets. Over time, as the games got more sophisticated, it took larger and larger groups of people to create them. It became a bit like a making movie. It became the domain of the game manufacturers alone pushing aside the individual contributors who could no longer afford to compete. Internally, tools emerged to help these design teams produce their games by making the production line more efficient. Then in the mid-90s the game manufacturers started including many of these tools as part of the games themselves so the people that brought the games could also customize and extend them. This extended the games shelf-life and maintained the gamers interest. The gamers didn’t have to be an employee of the games company or part of a big team. They just had to have the creativity and the desire. The tools to create where available to them.

By the end of the 90s pretty much every strategy and combat game had tools to allow you create new characters and new levels. Gamers started creating their own scenarios and passing them onto to their friends who, if they were any good, would pass them onto their friends, creating a grass roots type of movement. The manufacturers could observe these grass roots movements and where it saw significant momentum could tailor the next version of the game in those directions. A very collaborative, synergistic and mutually beneficial practice. In fact it was all very Web 2.0!

The games manufacturers had realized a couple of things. Firstly, they didn’t actually have the capacity to create every game for every gamer. And they had also realized that giving the power back to gamer was no bad thing anyway because the gamers were exactly the sort of people that would help take the games in new and innovative directions. For example, it was the grass roots movements that had dictated the rise of the WWII theme-d combat games. It was also the grass roots movements that evolved Machinima, a process whereby a game’s tools and 3D rendering engines were used, not to create new game experiences, but to create films! This movement in particular demonstrates the power of the tools & the community as this type of production could never have been imagined by authors of the tools.

Looking back on it now it is clear that a great deal of what has enabled these games and manufacturers to grow has come from the extensibility introduced by their tools. A renowned game manufacturer has stated that as much as 60% of their games could come from the community as opposed to their professional, internal design teams. Considering how big the gaming industry has become and how big analysts are predicting it will become this is of huge significance. It also means that the games manufacturers are really now competing for communities. Whoever has the most creative community will probably be the most successful.

So, back to Composer, Documentum and Enterprise Content Management. Clearly some parallels do exist. Just like games, ECM systems are large and complex. ECM solutions typically take many people, working together, to create. Composer already does and will continue to simplify this production, giving power back to our partners and customers. This should in turn lower the cost of ownership of the Documentum platform and the solutions that are created upon it. This should also help grow the Documentum community.

Also just like games manufacturers, it is literally impossible for us, or any other content management vendor for that matter, to produce every content-rich application for every customer. Again Composer comes to our rescue helping our partners and customers create the solutions that are right for them. In turn we can monitor these grass roots movements and lend a helping hand to produce vertical solutions where momentum exists.

More exciting yet is the potential for Composer to help us move ECM in new and innovative directions that can’t yet even be imagined. In the same way that game tools evolved machinima and SQL/SQL tools helped the database industry evolve whole new software industries like supply chain and document management. My hope is that the combination of standards efforts like CMIS and tools like Composer will help drive whole new software industries of our own, on top of our content management systems.

Ultimately only time will tell us what impact Composer will have on Documentum or the ECM in general. But the future looks bright. In the meantime…

Happy Composing

Nuxeo 5.2.M3 and Nuxeo WebEngine 1.0.RC released!

2008-11-18T16:38:30Z

Nuxeo 5.2.M3 and Nuxeo WebEngine 1.0.RC have just been released!

Please follow the link above for the full announcement, download URLs, and release notes.

Work is still going on for finishing Nuxeo 5.2 before the end of this year. The Nuxeo Developer Day on Dec. 1st will be an opportunity to discuss the new features and the roadmap. You are free to join as there a few more available seats.

Leading requirements

2008-11-18T13:55:40Z

You have just mentioned that maybe the pain you are feeling in managing your web content may be eased by implementing a web content management system (WCMS) and, all of the sudden, I.T. paratroopers are sliding down ropes with their software selection methodology and other "artifacts." You get suspicious as you recognize the same faces that "helped" you the last time around but are reassured that they have "learned aLOT" from their recent time and expense system procurement.

Spreadsheets are opened and fingers are poised over keys. They cue you with "R00001. The system shall be....?"

"easy to use?" is your diffident response.

"R00001. The system shall be easy to use. OK. R00002. The system shall...?"

Three months later, you have a spreadsheet with a thousand rows of "shalls" that any WCMS vendor (plus most ERP vendors) will say "yes" to. But, worst of all, they mean nothing to you. You are now back to precisely where you started.

What happened here?

Generic requirements gathering processes are self absorbed. They are optimized to comprehensively find business requirements, not understand them within the context of business goals. And the more the requirements are abstracted from the goal of managing content, the less they mean. Quantity and completeness are measurements of success rather than usefulness. What is more, most generic requirements analysis techniques are designed for building custom software rather than selecting software. While custom software development goes from requirements to design, when implementing an existing WCMS, much of the design is already in place. The trick to finding a WCMS is to match your needs with a pre-existing design. Generic requirements are an indirect path to that result.

In a WCMS selection, requirements gathering should stop when you have enough information to filter down the marketplace for a (3 or 4 product) short list. After that, the selection process takes a more experiential aspect where you look at the usability of the software and organizational compatibility with the suppliers that will help assemble the solution (software vendor and systems integrator). To be sure, this part of the process seems overly subjective to some - but, honestly, how objective is an aggregated "user friendliness" score of 3.2?

I like to focus on what I call "Leading Requirements." A leading requirement has at least one of two characteristics: it is important to the organization and/or it is a powerful filter on the marketplace. To be important, a requirement must critically affect daily usage or primary functions of the system. Powerful filter requirements get to the big demarcations of the marketplace - things like baking vs. frying, technology stack, content modeling, content reuse, workflow modeling, licensing strategies, etc. By focusing on leading requirements I can usually get down to 3 or 4 viable solutions that (based on industry gossip) appear to be working well at like companies and are sustainable.

By focusing on leading requirements, I can afford to take the time to document what each one really means. For functional requirements, I write "usage scenarios" that describe users using the solution to complete a business task (like publishing an article). At the bottom of each scenario, I list out the discrete requirements that were identified. These 2-4 paragraph narratives are then useful in the demo process because they become the script for the customized product demonstration.

After the product is selected, requirements are refined to determine what features will be enabled or implemented (and how) in the first release (and subsequent releases) of the system. At this point, you know the platform you are building on so you can explain requirements within the context of the native capabilities of the software. You can also adjust scope to leverage out of the box functionality and even prototype to clarify what you are talking about.

Focusing on leading requirements is not easy. It requires intimate knowledge of the business processes and also the content management industry. Still, there is no faster way to get to a short list of viable products and deeply evaluate them. If you want to learn more about leading requirements, I am teaching a workshop at the Gilbane conference in Boston. Will I see you there?

CQ5 General Availability

2008-11-18T00:00:01Z

I'm excited to point you to the announcement of CQ5's General Availability.

CQ5.1 sets new standards in terms of fun to develop, maintainability, usability, fun of use, in the enterprise software space, especially in WCM/ECM market for large enterprises.

As readers of this blog know, we've been working to validate our vision for CQ5 through our product release program and its quality gates. In addition of surpassing our quality milestones, we received great feedback from our Tech Preview and Beta customers, some have show us a way to go even further down our road and others have validated that they can also see our objectives in real live production, authoring and development. We had to add slots to our over subscribed beta program, all showed early and high levels of interest. This trend has proven to increase even more over the last few weeks.

For those of you who were not able to travel to Basel for our Worldwide Customer Summit see the pointers here for some of our beta customers' feedback.

If you haven't, I encourage you to try it for yourself. For more information you can also contact info@day.com

Reminder queries (... or what is my frequent fly number?)

2008-11-17T15:38:10Z

Hi all,

I started working for Liferay as a Core developper around two months ago and wanted to use this first post also to say hello to all the people I still don't know from the community, welcome everybody and thank Jorge, Alberto, Brian and Nate for all their support.

From version 5.2 we'll have a new functionality in the portal! It is called "Reminder Queries" and it will be used as a second security mechanism when a user forgets his password. (You may have seen this functionality somewhere else before in portals like Google or Yahoo...)

When this functionlity is enabled:

the user will have to provide an answer to a question he had chosen before in order to receive a new password. (What is your frequent fly number? what is your library card number? ... )

Question and answer can be modified through Control panel --> my account

Users have to choose a question the first time they log into the portal

Questions are configured by a property in portal.properties for the portal and every organization can define its own questions in different languages in a new section in control panel.

Organizations --> Reminder Queries" height="447" src="http://cdn.www.liferay.com/image/image_gallery?uuid=c77f1a9c-c20c-4c23-9781-fcc625b93ef8&groupId=1070979&t=1226937202111" width="740"/>

More information about reminder queries can be found at the following article in the wiki: http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/community/wiki/-/wiki/Main?_36_title=Reminder+Queries

Guardian Hack Days

2008-11-17T14:07:23Z

Both the New York Times and the Telegraph have been innovating on the newsmedia business model by introducing API's that expose their content and services for outside developers to leverage. Recently The Guardian held their "Hack Day at The Guardian".

To quote:

The concept is simple: take an idea to prototype in a day and then present your work to your colleagues and a panel of judges.

Guardian staff and friends participated in this 24 hour code-fest that ended in 90 second presentations in front of a panel. You can track activity on Twitter and see pictures on Flickr. I still don't know who won yet. I am sure that everyone is a winner :)

eXo Platform @FOSS Bridge

2008-11-16T11:16:50Z

eXo Platform South East Asia participated at the third FOSS Bridge conference which took place in Hanoi on November 14th. FOSS Bridge is a European sponsored program aimed at increasing synergies and partnerships between Europe and Vietnam around Free and Open Source Software. Many relevant topics were discussed, from licensing models to benefits of using Open Source software. The International Open Source Network (IOSN) organization produced an outstanding presentation. Its members promote Open Source Software as a strong catalyst to help emerging Asian-Pacific countries sustain their social and economic development. Finally, some demonstrations of popular Open Source softwares were made, as well as a tutorial on Open Office 3.0.

Some FOSS Bridge participants

Hung and I hold a presentation there. After introducing eXo Platform South East Asia, we depicted some of our major products : eXo Portal, eXo WebOS, eXo Enterprise Content Management, eXo Web Content Management, eXo Collaboration Suite and eXo Knowledge Suite. We finally touched on the coming eXo Social.

This was also an opportunity for us to promote our vision of “Open Source made in Vietnam”. eXo Platform is the largest Open Source project developed in Vietnam. In Hanoi, 50 open source experts are daily involved in the development of our platform. eXo has been developed step by step and mainly focused on the European, Middle East and African markets so far. That’s why eXo deserves to be more popular in Vietnam and more largely in South East of Asia. Our plan is to make partnerships with local IT companies and promote eXo products as domestic solutions for the domestic market. This will allow those partners not to reinvent the wheel when working on customer projects. Indeed, by reusing our middleware, they will be able to focus on the precise needs of their customers and also reduce costs in an economy threatened by the global crisis. By gaining experience and knowledge of our platform, those partners will also be able to remotely address the outsourcing needs of the markets where eXo is already widely adopted.

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links for 2008-11-15

2008-11-16T00:36:38Z

XMind - Social Brainstorming and Mind Mapping

(tags: xmind visualization tools software osx organization mindmapping mindmap opensource office)

Using ocmgroovy as Persistance Layer for Griffon

2008-11-15T14:04:13Z

Griffon is a very interessting approach to create an agile and fun framework for building Swing applications. Currently a very shy version numeration is used (0.0.1 is current), but the whole package is built using large know-how.

One thing missing is the persistance layer. It is planned to use GORM, the hibernate-based layer of Grails.

This situation is an opportunity for ocmgroovy, my "framework"(*) for persisting Groovy objects into a JCR. While beeing a little ugly hack atm, the basic things like save() and get() seem to work, at least for my basic test cases.

Using ocmgroovy in grails is one annoying and 2 easy steps

download ocmgroovy (either create the project via pom.xml or download all dependencies manually, which basically means to download all jackrabbit dependencies and xstream with its dependencies) and install it into {griffon_project}/lib directory
declare the class to be persisted in {griffon_project/lifecycle}/Startup.groovy
use it in your Griffon mvc

Step 2 looks like this


TransientRepository repository = new TransientRepository()
def session = repository.login(
       new SimpleCredentials("threatmanagment", "password".toCharArray()))
JcrPersister strategy = new JcrPersister()
strategy.session = session
strategy.instanceRoot ="threatmanagment"

strategy.instrumentate(ThreatModel, "name")
strategy.instrumentate(Dataflow,"id")

This makes model classes ThreatModel and Dataflow persistable, i.e. currently mostly adds save() and get() methods to instance and class, respectively

And Step 3: about as easy


ThreatModel model = new ThreatModel("name": "TestModel")
model.save()
...
ThreatModel model2 = ThreatModel.get("TestModel")

Please note that this is all very shaky at the moment (and therefore will create a black hole if you try it at home ;)), but might prove usable in the future.

I probably will release a PoC-project in the near future.

===
(*): ocmgroovy is very alpha and only used by myself. Therefore I do not consider this to be a framework

links for 2008-11-14

2008-11-15T00:49:09Z

Dr Nic » To WebKit or not to WebKit within your iPhone app?

(tags: webkit uiwebview iphone javascript howto development cocoa tutorial reference objective-c)

[video] eXo Social by Jeremi Joslin

2008-11-14T16:58:49Z

Julien Brulland - marketing manager - interviews Jeremi Joslin about eXo Social

Julien Brulland interviews Jeremi Joslin about eXo Social from Benjamin Mestrallet on Vimeo.

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links for 2008-11-13

2008-11-14T00:40:21Z

iPhone Style Icon Tutorial | Keep The Web Weird

(tags: webdesign tutorials tutorial photoshop iphone icons icon howto)

Writing application for eXo Social with appEngine (so not in java but in python)

2008-11-13T11:36:28Z

eXo Social allows to create openSocial applications. So you no more need to write any line of java to create an application for eXo. The only thing needed is to respect the openSocial standard (xml, html and javascript). The backend, if there is a need of one, can be written in any language.

As an example, I wrote a simple code sharing application based on appEngine during the Google DevFest. Basically you enter the code you want to share, and the application give you a URL to share it with your friends. To allow to access to this application, I wrote a simple gadget that allows to enter some code, send it to the service and share the URL with my contacts. To achieve this, I just wrote few lines of python deployed on appEngine to exchange information in JSON with my gadget and only javascript, css and html in my gadget.

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