redturtle blog http://blog.redturtle.it/redturtle-blog The redturtle blog daily 1 redturtle blog http://blog.redturtle.it/redturtle-blog http://blog.redturtle.it/logo.png PloneboardNotify: how tests will save my fat boy http://blog.redturtle.it/redturtle-blog/2010/03/16/ploneboardnotify-how-tests-will-save-you-maybe A new release of PloneboardNotify... no much more features, but now I can think about refactoring my too grown son. 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! ;-)
]]> 2010-03-16T09:04:23+01:00 2010-03-16T09:04:23+01:00 Luca Fabbri Ploneboard forum notification english test Plone Careful with that ajax, Eugene http://blog.redturtle.it/redturtle-blog/2010/03/11/careful-with-that-ajax-eugene Ajax calls are an invaluable and powerful tool to deploy pleasant user interfaces, but some attention must be paid to avoid bad surprises. 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

]]> 2010-03-11T16:40:00+01:00 2010-03-11T16:39:48+01:00 Alessandro Pisa jQuery javascript Plone english feedly: il tuo smart magazine http://blog.redturtle.it/redturtle-blog/2010/03/07/feedly Dai un po' di vita al tuo vecchio e stantio feedreader Feedly fondamentalmente è un aggregatore di feed rss. bello eh?

FeedlyOk, 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.

Feedly feedL'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.

Feedly miniInteressante 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.

 

 

]]> 2010-03-07T20:25:05+01:00 2010-03-07T20:25:05+01:00 Massimo Azzolini web rss feedly Wikitude: Realtà aumentata http://blog.redturtle.it/redturtle-blog/2010/03/04/wikitude-realta-aumentata Utilizza il tuo telefono per ottenere informazioni su dove ti trovi 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:

]]> 2010-03-04T10:46:07+01:00 2010-03-04T10:46:07+01:00 Massimo Azzolini web mappe community phone augmented reality Integration of PloneGazette with plone.app.discussion http://blog.redturtle.it/redturtle-blog/2010/03/01/integration-of-plonegazette-and-plone.app.discussion The new product collective.discussionintegration.plonegazette provides the integration of PloneGazette and plone.app.discussion. 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/

 

 

]]> 2010-03-01T11:25:00+01:00 2010-03-02T10:32:52+01:00 Federica D'Elia Plone english Do not use "print". Again plone_log is your friend http://blog.redturtle.it/redturtle-blog/2010/02/15/do-not-use-print.-again-plone_log-is-your-friend An unexpected behaviour I found when writing test for a product. Use "print" command for logging is bad if you want to perform functional tests. 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.

]]> 2010-02-15T10:11:02+01:00 2010-02-15T10:11:02+01:00 Luca Fabbri python test english print Plone The Top 11 Tips for Keeping Your Servers Healthy http://blog.redturtle.it/redturtle-blog/2010/01/20/the-top-11-tips-for-keeping-your-servers-healthy Have you ever wondered how healthy your servers are? Are you running with default settings on your production servers? Do maintenance tasks run when they should, or are they even running at all? Are you using appropriate database features, controlling log sizes, or leaving debug variables in the .ini? Have you implemented critical features that were introduced with the server software in your latest upgrade? This cross-platform session will shed light on a number of items most administrators overlook or simply do not understand the importance of implementing. Learn from real-world customer examples and see how to remedy the situations presented.** 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

 

 

]]> 2010-01-20T18:55:00+01:00 2010-01-27T12:37:06+01:00 Andrea Baglioni Lotus Lotusphere 2010 Domino Lotus Notes Traveler, news and photos http://blog.redturtle.it/redturtle-blog/2010/01/20/lotus-notes-traveler-news-and-photos


Again, during the opening general session IBM talks about Lotus Notes Traveler. First of all they announce the support for Android platform, then a big news for people who wanted encrypted mail on iPhone: Lotus Notes Traveler Companion is available today on App Store!


Lotus Notes Traveler Companion allow to read encrypted mail on the iPhone directly using the Notes ID security!

Last is the extension of the support for other operating system. I mean, now Travel can be installed only on Windows OS, with Traveler 8.5.2 you can also install on Linux SUSE!!!

Cool! Isn't it? It's so cool that we can't wait. 8.5.2 is supposed to be released in Q3-Q4 2010. This mean that we can have Android support on Linux based Traveler at the end of this year!

]]> 2010-01-20T01:52:21+01:00 2010-01-20T01:52:21+01:00 Fabio Pignatti Lotus Lotusphere 2010 IBM Project Vulcan, photos and news http://blog.redturtle.it/redturtle-blog/2010/01/20/ibm-project-vulcan-photos-and-news


On the OGS we learn about IBM Project Vulcan, as report on Ed Brill's Blog “Project Vulcan is the blueprint for where Lotus Notes is going”. During the Opening general session we have some screen shots of the evolution of the Notes client:





and some concept on mobile devices like BlackBerry or iPhone:






Other news comes from the keynote during the first two day of Lotusphere, one is particularly important: after 8.5.2 Notes will be “vulcanized”.

Other pictures on Project Vulcan can be found in my Flickr photostream.

My 2 cents on this project are:
  1. Notes 9 will be the Project Vulcan implementation like Notes 8 has been the Hannover's one.
  2. Project Vulcan will be hugely developed in xPages and other web technology.
  3. Notes 3 to 8 apps still work fine in the Vulcan. This doesn't came from me but from history. :-)
]]> 2010-01-20T01:26:46+01:00 2010-01-20T01:26:46+01:00 Fabio Pignatti Lotus Lotusphere 2010 There’s No Fixing Ugly: How to Make a Great First Impression with Your Applications http://blog.redturtle.it/redturtle-blog/2010/01/20/there2019s-no-fixing-ugly-how-to-make-a-great-first-impression-with-your-applications When it comes to client and/or user-acceptance, how your applications look is as important—and possibly more important—than how they actually work. Well-designed and eye-pleasing interfaces are not terribly hard to create, yet provide enormous perceived value to your end-users -- and, more importantly, to their bosses. In this session you will learn a series of easy-to-follow guidelines for making applications that look as good as they work.** Lotusphere 2010 banner

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

]]> 2010-01-20T00:05:59+01:00 2010-01-20T00:08:38+01:00 Andrea Baglioni Lotus Lotusphere 2010 What's New in Composite Applications in IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.1 http://blog.redturtle.it/redturtle-blog/2010/01/19/whats-new-in-composite-applications-in-ibm-lotus-notes-8.5.1 Come and learn about whats new with composite applications in Lotus Notes 8.5.1. You'll see how you can leverage the new tooling in the Composite Application Editor (CAE) to quickly assemble applications and create new components using "point and click". We'll show how different components like Web, XPages, Java Views and Eclipse views can be assembled in a composite and on the side shelf within your application. You'll learn about the new container framework and what this means for your components. We'll cover the low level extensions to the CAE that allow you to add your own custom tooling for your components, and you'll learn all about custom actions and see how they can make your applications more powerful.** Lotusphere 2010 banner

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.

 

]]> 2010-01-19T22:30:00+01:00 2010-01-19T21:33:31+01:00 Andrea Baglioni Lotus Lotusphere 2010 Domino composite Lotusphere in sentence, Day 2 - general and Lotus application development strategy http://blog.redturtle.it/redturtle-blog/2010/01/19/lotusphere-in-sentence-day-2-general-and-lotus-application-development-strategy
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.
]]> 2010-01-19T20:25:00+01:00 2010-01-19T20:24:27+01:00 Fabio Pignatti Lotus Lotusphere 2010 Lotusphere in sentence, Day 1 - other sentences http://blog.redturtle.it/redturtle-blog/2010/01/19/lotusphere-in-sentence-day-1-other-sentences 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.


]]> 2010-01-19T14:51:22+01:00 2010-01-19T14:51:22+01:00 Fabio Pignatti Lotus Lotusphere 2010 AD106 - XPages just keep getting better http://blog.redturtle.it/redturtle-blog/2010/01/18/ad106-xpages-just-keep-getting-better Last year at Lotusphere, XPages burst onto the Lotus Domino application development landscape. Since then, the developer community has embraced XPages and delivered compelling Lotus Domino Web solutions. 8.5.1 delivered on the vision by providing the ability to build an application once for the Web, the Notes client or expose as an iWidget.Come hear about other 8.5.1 enhancements, what is coming in 8.5.2 and glimpse towards the future.** Lotusphere 2010 banner

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)

]]> 2010-01-18T22:55:00+01:00 2010-01-19T14:15:13+01:00 Andrea Baglioni Lotus Lotusphere 2010 Domino xPages AD109 - XPages perfomance and scalability http://blog.redturtle.it/redturtle-blog/2010/01/18/ad109-xpages-perfomance-and-scalability Understanding the XPages architecture is key to building performant scalable enterprise-ready Lotus Domino web applications. We'll show how to go under the hood to discover functional features that help your application perform and scale well. You'll learn about design patterns and techniques that ensure your applications are optimally tuned for your business requirements, and we'll show how to integrate existing business logic -- without increasing performance cost.** Lotusphere 2010 banner

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

]]> 2010-01-18T22:00:00+01:00 2010-01-19T14:14:32+01:00 Andrea Baglioni Lotus Lotusphere 2010 Domino xPages