Thought stream

As I was thinking of implementing customized filterable datalists in Alfresco, my focus shifted to RoR. I had heard about RoR being simple scripting language that would help me in converting my thoughts to machine-actionable instructions! With the hope of creating the list in an hours time, I quickly committed myself to RoR inclusion. RoR comes with its own set of problems. First the RoR examples that work with older version dont work anymore with 2.3.4. The latest version 3.0 was not available for download. Anyways, I downloaded, Aptana's RadRails 2.05 and started my experiments. RoR promotes convention over configuration. This looked very interesting and promising. I had to struggle to get proper libmySQL.dll to get connected to my MySQL server. It seemed that Ruby 2.3.4 does not work with latest dll of MySQL (learnt from posts across the net). Finally, I was good to go. Indeed, I could get my first application (CRUD) in just 2 hours. Here are my initial opinions on RoR. I ...

With regard to Alfresco, I am trying to use Alfresco share capability to enable small and medium companies to have their own collaborative ECMs. I feel, Alfresco Share is decent enough to do the job. I am using 3.4b version. I have done look and feel change to the theme, the changes are kept to color and logo only. Even though the layouts can be tampered, I feel and suggest not to tamper with. Alfresco share uses FTL for UI layouts and JS for providing dynamic behavior to the UI. One needs to spend a lot of time to in decoding the links between context files to do even the smallest adaptation that may be required. Once, you know how to read and related context files, then this exercise becomes pretty easy. I hope, that good documentation may ease the process, if you go for enterprise edition. It is important to understand the business intent before jumping guns on customization. For example, the firm wants to maintain the daily recruitment tracker to find out how many candidates ar...

Web 2.0 Features Objective The objective of this document is to provide the insight to the web 2.0 features and general requirements associated with the feature. The document also attempts to provide information on the Semantic markups, Mashups, Tableless design. Pre-requisites Web application development experience, HTML/XHTML/DHTML/Java scripting/DOM knowledge UI development experience Ability to provide user’s perspective to enable good user experience Below listed are some concepts that will be handy while designing Web 2.0 sites. Rich user experience The richness is very subjective. The idea here is to enhance the look and feel, experience of the User interface so that the users of the web site are emotionally connected which would result in long lasting association. In today’s world, sustaining and increasing the user base are the biggest challenges; to make it much more difficult, the competition is severe. Semantic markup Traditional usages of HTML tags which are meant ...

In this blog, I will talk about one of the requirements related to YouTube integration. Here's the context. Your customer will publish RSS feed and your customer does not want to manually log into YouTube site and upload. The customer wants the uploading activity to be automated. He wants you to design loosely coupled application. This is one of the typical integration requirements in the media space. Google provides YouTube APIs through which one can build stand-alone application. Here is one of the solutions that can be implemented. In this case, design a stand-alone YouTubeUploader application that can be scheduled through Cron job. While YouTube enables developers with APIs, authentication mechanisms, client libraries, it is important to segregate roles and responsiblity of your classes. In my solution, I will make YouTubeUploader as main class which can be scheduled through cron job. This class invokes FeedParser which can access feed through http URL. Usually, the publishers ...

Media distribution platforms focus on effective distribution of the media content, predominantly videos. With the increasing demand on enabling the web presence with dynamic video content, the platform adds immense value paving ways for generating revenue. It is not unusual to see the popular content management organizations will expand to provide media distribution services. In simple words, media distribution involves content ingestion, content processing, content categorization, content management, content protection, content distribution, content delivery targeted specifically to content consumption layer. Content ingestion is a process of gathering content from various sources. When acquired from various sources, they need to converted in uniform format to manage it efficiently. For example, news clip recorded on the field can be in raw digital format, or user generated home video uploaded to the system, or Warner brothers new movie made available in the system. Before making the...

Why Alfresco, not any other? I personally find Alfresco has many features already built in that can be used for office automation and collaboration along with content management. Having said that I dont think, Alfresco user interface is one of the greatest to use. However, UI is good enough to carry on the work. I feel, as far the enterprises are concerned, getting the relevant business functionality assumes greater importance. I am listing some of the features, I find it useful for organization. - Built in content model, role, aspects, rules are good enough to implement workable solutions - Well built document management system extended to manage records as well - Alfresco share, a web application for collaboration is good enough for the kind of collaborations we normally perform in organizations - Google like search - Ability to use Google docs as repository (simple enablement in configuration) - Ability to create access controlled repository - Ability to expose repository as network...