The new release of PloneboardNotify doesn't give us many new features but is not this the real focus of this article.

This add-on was already available and used in production environment, and one of the first effort was to keep Plone 2.5 compatibility.
The same is for the new 0.4 release (and maybe Plone 2.5 compatibility will continue until all of our customer will drop this version).

So? What is the problem?

Thanks for testing

Sometimes when you develop something that is useful for a single site, it became magically useful for other... but sometimes you are too stupid (and lazy) to understand it.
Let's go back to Ploneboard: after all the notification e-mail after a new forum discussion/response is a wanted feature (worst... an expected feature), not available in Ploneboard (that, even if it isn't perfect, is the only mature choice available right now on Plone to have a forum).

PloneboardNotify is a good example of a bad way to start a product... developed fast but with no eye on good OOP, without thinking about make it extensible... not tested at all. It was only a stupid event script that send e-mail (luckily this old version isn't available or any public SVN so the Story will not judge me).

First public released versions were only more "user friendly", making it usable in any context where you have Plone and Ploneboard. Maybe they are good release but was clean the need of refactoring: but refactoring is someway a dangerous task (the code is working... why I must spend my time making it better only to get the same features and be forced to test all feature and behaviour from scratch? I'm sure to remember what I need to test?)!

The problem there was (and is also now) the "core" (please... don't look at it!). Tests at every release were done by me (and my name is not Funkload) manually playing with the browser, repeating the same operation on Plone 2.5 and 3. Time after time the core grow as new feature is added... Tests are every time more expensive and boring...

What is changed now? Nothing! PloneboardNotify is still a mess... but now it's a tested mess!

Future

The primary effort of this release was adding a complete functional tests coverage of all features (for both Plone 2.5 and 3 versions). After that, thanks to the help of Nicolas Laurance, I also added the HTML e-mail feature.

Now I have no fear to make changes to the code core... also in this release I removed some stupid piece of code (after completing tests!) and introduce adapters. Having tests available now will speed up dramatically the develop process of new features.

Next steps will be to reach a better OOP and making the product more customizable by other developer in their sites (like customize the e-mail template in some simple way).

Lessons learned

• Don't be lazy. You can make this code more reusable. Always.
  
• Don't be lazy. Write tests! Better: you will became lazy if you don't write tests because testing manually is very boring and you'll begin skipping some action!
  
• Don't be stupid. You can't make deep refactoring and expect that all will work after you've finished, so...
  make tests!

In these days it happened to me to work on a couple of custom Plone edit forms using ajax calls to simplify user data entry.

At a first glance, the user experience was great, but under the hood the whole machinery was hiding potential problems, the reason being that in both cases the ajax calls used in the form were relative to the document path, even when if the document was in the factory!

This means that every time the ajax call was invoked, additional security checks were performed and in the case of the documents inside the factory other this lead to an unwanted creation of temporary documents!

The security checks and the portal factory abuse increased the response time and could potentially raise conflict errors.

During the development phase the problem is hardly noticeable, but on a production server it will probably make the form unusable, especially if you complex security checks are needed.

The solution was simply to call the views with another context (in those cases the container). 

Lesson learned: be careful to the context of your ajax call

Feedly fondamentalmente è un aggregatore di feed rss. bello eh?

Ok, se la metto giù così non vale neanche la pena di perderci tempo e di scrivere una pagina in questo allegro blog.

In effetti ha alcune simpatiche funzionalità che lo rendono decisamente gradevole e che lo rendono superiore ad altri sistemi.

Ovviamente è una web application e si integra con google: usi lo ss utente e sfrutti i feed che hai già configurato su Reader. Ovviamente li puoi riaggregare come preferisci e ne puoi aggiungere altri molto rapidamente.

L'effetto immediato è di ottenere una versione magazine dei tuoi feed. Dal feed stesso ottiene immagini e li riorganizza mettendone alcuni in evidenza.

Ma la cosa che lo distingue dagli altri è il fatto che, a partire dai tuoi feed, ottenga altre informazioni da altre fonti: twitter, flickr, youtube, amazon.

Per ogni tua aggregazione puoi definire una view predefinita.

Interessante la lettura del feed. Te lo presenta come popup in maniera estesa e già da li lo puoi ri-sharare verso i nostri cari vecchi social network, ma lo puoi anche inviare via gmail.

Lo installi come estensione di Firefox, di Chrome o di Safari, IE... non so :), altrimenti non va (questo non è per niente cool)

Interessante il feedly mini, li appoggiato in basso a destra nella pagina. Mentre navighi analizza il contenuto della pagina e ti propone i migliori post tra i tuoi feed relativi al contesto.

Puoi anche salvare la pagina piuttosto che postarla su twitter/facebook o inviarla via mail.

Ogni tanto ti ritrovi con qualcuno che ti racconta le ultime meraviglie della realtà aumentata [wikipedia]. 

Fondamentalmente (e semplificando moltissimo la cosa..) si tratta di sovrapporre livelli informativi alla realtà che stiamo vivendo.

Lo possono fare sfruttando in vari modi oggettini che sono già presenti: dal famoso caschetto da realtà virtuale all'ormai famigerato iPhone.

Sicuramente l'uso di device mobili è l'opzione più attraente e più consumer.

I signori di wikitude si sono inventati:

• una community dove ognuno può aggiungere i suoi punti di interesse (POI): wikitude.me
• un browser che gira su Android, iPhone, e Symbian (Nokia N97 e N97 mini). iPhone 3GS. Il mio ovviamente non va :(
  
• volevamo farci mancare delle API? ovviamente no! Certo che in Java...

l'effetto finale è notevole:

The product plone.app.discussion is becoming the standard way to add comments in Plone. If both products plone.app.discussion and Products.PloneGazette are installed the creation of any PloneGazette content type fails, because PloneGazette content types not provide the adapter for "IConversation":

Traceback (innermost last):
  ...
  Module plone.app.discussion.catalog, line 29, in total_comments
TypeError: ('Could not adapt', <NewsletterTheme at /ausl/newslettertheme.2010-01-26.2440135204>, <InterfaceClass plone.app.discussion.interfaces.IConversation>)

To solve the problem we set an adapter for the types defined in Products.PloneGazette. This adapter provides the interface "IConversation" of plone.app.discussion. The adapter provides the attribute "total_comments" and the method "enabled", which returns False (means that the commeting is disable).

<adapter
      for="Products.PloneGazette.interfaces.INewsletterTheme"
      factory=".newsletter.NewsletterConversation"
      provides="plone.app.discussion.interfaces.IConversation"
      />

So you can create objects Newsletter without any problem.

Unfortunately PloneGazette does not define an interface for each content types, so through zcml we say that these content type implements a particular interfaces.Then we give the adapter for those interfaces.

The new product collective.discussionintegration.plonegazette makes possible the creation of the PloneGazette content types if there is an installation of plone.app.discussion in your instance.

http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/collective.discussionintegration.plonegazette/

In early days on Plone I always used this API for logging:

context.plone_log("That's a log message")

This will give you a log message like this:

2010-02-15 09:56:32 INFO Plone Debug: 
That's a log message

I don't know or remember if the Python print command always worked on Plone, but right now you can use it freely.

I found that sometimes I used print, just because is simpler (and I don't need any context as plone_log).

Now the problem... use plone_log (or every other use of python logging system) is safe when writing functional doctests.

The print command isn't! If you are testing code that use print, you must be aware of its output writing test. For example:

This is a fake doctest.
Let's say that calling the button below will run some code that use Python "print" command.
For example for write "Hello".

    >>> browser.getControl('button').click()
    'Hello'

I don't like this... this is not a useful test!

This is very annoying!

So? It's better to not use print for logging messages, but rely on other logging APIs.

Best practies in pillole:

• Pay attention to console errors!!
• Are you using default settings?
• Are your servers too open?
• Know your schedules
• Keep your servers clean
• Clustered server tips
• ID management
• New features not implemented
• Policies – are you using them?
• Maintenance tasks
• Get to the new ODS

Il titolo parla da solo. Esempi di cosa NON fare e di cosa invece tener conto nel realizzare un'applicazione.

Il messaggio in generale è questo:

"se l'applicazione è esteticamente mal fatta, la prima impressione è che non funzioni"

Interessantissima demo di 8 minuti che ha dimostrato, con pochi accorgimenti (font-family, font-size, colori) come passare da un'interfaccia orrenda a qualcosa di accattivante

Bob Balfe ha presentato due interessantissime CA realizzate con la versione 8.5.1 e illustrato i nuovi oggetti:

• Synphony Spreadsheet Container
• Web Browser container

• Host on Demand container
• Notes Document Container
• Notes View container

Ed inoltre, per il futuro:

• CAI URL enhancement - pagealias
• Role based access to components

Peccato per la scarsità dei talk riguardanti l'argomento, ma di sicuro Balfe, Guru assoluto in materia, ha alzato ai massimi livelli la qualità del suo intervento.

General:

1. My daily agenda: BP210, KEY101, BP108, BP111, BP204, ID615.
2. “Project Vulcan is the blueprint for where Lotus Notes is going” [Ed Brill Blog]
   

Lotus Application Development Strategy:

1. Lotus Notes/Domino developer skills are important and remain important.
2. For the future release Lotus will support and integrate to OpenID.
3. For the future release Lotus will support and integrate to Oauth.
4. Again, next releases? Will be much more based on web technology (e.g. HTML5, CSS3, Dojo).
5. Samples of integration with cloud software already exist: Tungle, Gist, Openspan.

General:

1. My daily agenda: OGS, ID201, KEY104, AD201, BP306, AD207, BOF201.
2. Thanks Bob for the button!
3. Great sushi at Kimonos restaurant.

Lotus Notes and Domino strategy and future:

1. LotusLive Notes will be launched
2. Support for Citrix, XenApp, VMWare client virtualization technology
3. Lotus Notes Traveler on Android
4. Lotus Domino will be available as a image on  Amazon EC2
5. Lotus Business Solutions Catalog is being released
6. Symphony 3.0 will be beta in the next month and it will be released in 2010
7. After 8.5.2 Notes will be “vulcanized”
8. Project Concord was introducted: web-based collaborative document editor for creating, editing and sharing documents.
   

Symphony:

1. Symphony “Vienna” will be based on OpenOffice 3.x (Q2 2010).
2. Symphony “Vienna” will be support MS VB macro.
3. LotusScript classes are available to manipulate Symphony applications (Java API will be available with “Vienna”).
4. Strategy: catch up with the latest OpenOffice regurarly.
   

Domino Designer:

1. Many people during BOF push to have a Mac based Domino Designer soon.
2. Performance in opening mail template: benchmark says 10 seconds, if you experience are minutes it's not normal.
3. Lotus Domino Designer 8.5.2 beta is available for partner program.
   
   
   

Annunciate le novità per le XPages (nella 8.5.2)

- REST e nuovi advanced controls
- modalità off-line e repliche locali
- wiring con le composite applications
- Performance improvements
- iWidget mashup
- hidden field text control
- RichText editor migliorato
- riuso delle funzionalità esistenti: LS libraries, forms, vies
- utility per convertire vecchi form, viste in xpages
- nuovi DataSource (jdbc, db relazionali)

Tips&Tricks veramente utili per incrementare le performace

- i tool di monitoring consigliati: Firebug, YSlow, PageSpeed
- IBM Xpages Profiling tool: database per il tuning delle XPages in termini di CPU, cache ecc...
- consigli per il rendering delle pagine e per migliorare il JSF cycle lifecycle

- dataCache per le viste (nuovo nella 8.5.1)

- come usare Java nelle XPages per mantenere performance ridotte

In the form of "aspect - goal" that's the key sentences of the Domino server future:

• Database management tool improvements - Leverage a single tool that performs all application/database maintenance tasks (eg compact, index update, ...).
  
• SAML - Provide greater flexibility regarding secure authentication.
  
• Platform expansion – Lower costs, improve flexibility and scalability (64 bit, virtual env, Linux platform).
• RESTful APIs – Enable ISV's and application builders with broad set of API's usable from any application endpoint.
• DXL – Roud-trip DXL design elements with no loss.

General and vision:

• Lotus knows why.
• Lotus knows how.
• This year the special guest is Captain Kirk William Shatner directly form Enterprise!
• GM, RIM, Continental, Panasonic and Zurich are the customers presented this year by Lotus.
• You knew the importance of delivering on promises.
• 18378 new customers after Domino 8 was been released.
• Positive disruption: capabilities for free Symphony.
• Collaboration agenda is a new offering who puts together different Lotus products and is designed with industry specific teams who helps company to design his own specific solution: lower the cost of collaboration and improve people collaboration.
• File Navigator by Rene Winkelmeyer is the best open source Notes application.
• LotusLive with 18M users, now is offered for 4 USD per user per month.
• IBM Project Vulcan is a sneak peak into the evolution of collaboration.
  

Demo time:

• Now in xPages applications is possible to use Quickr component.
• IBM Multimedia Library for Lotus Notes: the fastest, most affordable way to learn Lotus Notes, Sametime and Quickr!
• Quickr and Alfresco are now integrated.
• Announced Lotus Notes Traveler for Android
• Lotus Notes Traveler Companion is an iPhone plugin who can provide to access encrypted email on the iPhone (using Notes ID security!)
• xPages now runs in the Notes client: develop once, run everywhere!
• LotusLive labs is a set of services availables in lotuslive.com. Some examples: slide library, event maps, collaborative recorded meetings and composer.

Specific on Project Vulcan:

• Project Vulcan embraces the one programming model: public REST APIs, Widget and Mashups, xPages for Notes, HTML5 for richer user experiences.
  
• Project Vulcan: continuity, convergence, innovation, new opportunities
  
• Project Vulcan and the competition? IBM says it is not an answer to Google Wave.
• Project Vulcan is based on Notes Client and in the browser you have the same experience.
• Project Vulcan can be accessed through Blackberry or iPhone.
  
• Project Vulcan as the brand new Notes 9 is my guess.
• Project Vulcan will be shipped in 2011.
  

John Head e Alex Kassabov hanno mostrato in un talk di sicuro effetto scenico riguardante l'evoluzione del mondo dell'integrazione tra Lotus Notes e i principali productivity tool come Miicrosoft Office e Lotus Symphony, in entrambe le direzioni.

Anche in questo caso la collaborazione tra IBM e OpenNTF farà si che un il progetto open si concretizzi in un template scaricabile per l'utilizzo.

Le novità sono molteplici: innanzitutto l'annuncio dell'implementazione della classe SymphonyApplication, che sgrava lo sviluppatore dall'utilizzo delle classi UNO per l'integrazione con OpenOffice, sia numerosi esempi veramente utili per creare spreadsheet, documenti e presentazioni a partire da documenti notes con un semplice click.

Le slide sono disponibili sul sito di John Head

Ottimo talk di Paul Calhoun su WebService.

Retrospettiva su provider e consumer, nulla che già non si sappia, ma la chicca è che ha promesso di rendere disponibile per il download un db che offre tra le altre cose (utility per la gestione XML, agenti ecc.) un xslt che permette, attraverso il transformer di DXL, di convertire form Notes in XPages. Ancora in stato semi-embrionale (per esempio, non gestisce correttamente combobox e radiobutton), ma di sicuro effetto ed utilità

Tra le altre cose, tips&tricks, esempi di testing provider in Eclipse Galileo e integrazione tra Xpages e Webservice.

General:

1. After “Emergence” in 2008 and “Resonance” in 2009, this year the Lotusphere theme is “Lotus knows”.
2. My daily agenda: BOOT103 (great job Franziska), SHOW105, BOOT104, JMP102 and Welcome Reception.

Admin tips:

1. DAOS and SAN? Again, be sure transaction logging is on a separate and dedicated LUN.
2. Set all compressions "on" using console: load compact mail -ZU -n -v -C
3. Deny access list and HTTP? Be careful you have to set “Enforce server access settings” in server documents, ports, Internet ports otherwise HTTP do not follow the configuration.
4. In NAB “Actions-> Set Secure Internet Password” allow you to encrypt the HTTP password in secure way. Note, I mean a “secure”, not a “more secure” cause the standard HTTP password mechanism use @Password to encrypt so (eg) same password are show with the same encryption. Mandatory!
5. In the configuration setting, set “Enforce Internet/Password Lockout” to prevent a brute force attack over HTTP. You can also use policy to specify a per-person criteria.
6. Notes Shared Login do not require software installation on the clients (and it's much better than previous OS login) and you can use policy to set it!
   
   

Sametime:

1. Sametime 8.5 will be released in two flavors: Sametime 8.5 Community Services for chats and awareness (Domino based) and Sametime 8.5 Meeting Services (Websphere based) for meeting and video conferencing.
2. Wes Morgan rules on Sametime 97/3 utilization: 97% of the users will be logged into chat, 3% parteciping in meetings.

Welcome reception:

1. Still cold. :-(
2. A nice match against Andrea playing tennis with Wii.