Ax & The Crew

Summer 2007, lots of travels.
This post is about San Diego. I've been there to attend at the CSIG 2007 (Cyber Infrastructures for Geoscience). I had a great time, with great people coming from all over the us. Some of them will show up in the gallery...I hope they won`t mind for that! +_+
The Summer school at the UCSD was really interesting and productive in terms of learning and networking..

Then, If you are interested in IT technologies and Geoscience heve a look at this site..

www.geongrid.org/

Or if you are just interested in San Diego.. o_O look down here!

Here it comes..
This is a new meshup project/idea that everyone could use in his freeflux weblog.
This time everything seems to fit like in a Lego^_tm castle!
Here is how it started..
I have an account on Flickr.. but with just one pic..
I mean.. I have my weblog.. why putting my pics on flickr?
Here, those swiss guys allow me to do whatever I want..(they even gain space, if you are kind with them :-))
I did my custom ajax gallery.. Works great for me..
...so I am happy with Freeflux!

Anyway..I discovered that many many friends of mine have a flickr account with many pics.. then.. why don't make them (somehow) meet each other on my weblog.. with their favourite pictures!
Is it possible?..yes it is.. or at least.. I am trying to.

I've just opened a new section, Ax & The flickErS.. and I am planning to spend some time in improving it
So it could change in the upcoming.. ages, you know.. work..private life..friends.. the netherlands :-)



It's Powered by FLICKR RESTful web services.. and, of course, the great Flux CMS.
Then..javascript "Parasitic" inheritance,XSL, ajax..gnip gnap..flip flop..etc

Have a look..and if at that time won't work.. well I said.. I am trying to :-)!

Hi,

I`m starting, together with other colleagues, the design of a new web portal for scientific applications (seismology), that will be part of a new eu-project.

The idea is to set up a distributed internet infrastructure, in order to give access to several services within one federated web site.
It seems that the available OS portal frameworks, based on portlets and web services, fit this issue in a good way


I`ve just setup an enviroment based on Jetspeed2, Pluto Portal, and WSRP4J.
Well.. I must say, positive results until now.


Anyway, at some point you I had to face on a real everyday life problem.. how to develop, test, and debug portlets without loosing minutes for compiling and redeploying your code for each small change!

Well, there`s the Pluto plugin for Eclipse.. but seems quite outdated, and not really working on my Eclipse 3.2.
Googling and googling.. nothing really useful and complete showed up, until now.
There`s a "infant" Jetspeed plugin project for Eclipse, but ok.. it is "infant"!!
I tried to use Java CreatorII.. no comment.

So.. maybe nothing new, but I found a personal solution that I think could be customized and applied in other enviroments.

This is the software list.

- Eclipese 3.2, wtp plugin 1.5
- Tomcat 5.5.20
- PlutoPortal 1.0.2, checkout here

svn checkout https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/portals/pluto/branches/pluto-1.0.2/ pluto

Note: In this release this bug http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PLUTO-219 is fixed
(Needed for standard JSF 1.1 portlets deployment with jsr-porltet.jar bridge)

- Maven 1.0 (for pluto building and portlet deployment)
- Maven 2.0 with Eclipse Maven2 plugin for portlets .war packaging.

I suppose you already have Pluto deployed into tomcat (so also maven 1 should be well configured), M2 eclipse plugin installed and.. yes, knowledge how to use maven2...
yep, that`s it, I think.

Well in the box you can see the the content of a README file that I`ve prepared for the other developers of the project, we don`t even work in the same institute, we don`t even work in the same country!!.. (and also for me of course, memory fail safe)




Now, I am waiting for comments like.. You are fool.. you can easily use this or that OS tools for the same task!
I really hope so!

Anyway, in the mean time, it seems to work for me, and the development should be quick enough. I hope !

Check this out (Better with Firefox)

Hei, look at your left.. What's that "axelspin Talk"!? What's for!?

I leave to the great developers of meebo to explain..

Ok, I`ve just noticed that someone is starting to surf around the web to have a look to my ajax image gallery.. but there`s lack in documentation.. so I worked a bit on it and here you go.. this is a brief gallery description with the sourcecode (css excluded at the moment).. HTML:


Of course everything could be improved here.. anyway.. I wanted to handle different indipendent galleries and for this reason I`m using javascript prototypes to handle a each gallery as a single indipendent object.. in this way you can have more than one gallery in the same page just adding this piece of html.

The numbers used to complete the id labels are for the proposal I have just mentioned, they must be different for each gallery. I tried also to do a full dinamic gallery..(ths html code shouldn`t be there.. but ok.. some cross browsing issue made me a bit sick :-) )




..Ok.. not so easy to comment, but if you need.. contact me!

Just one thing.. maybe someone could think.. ok and how ajax is used here?
Ajax has been used to load the xml desciption of a Flux cms folder (where I stored the images for a specific gallery) this xml is given by a trick thanks to chregu`s help, that enable the cms to make public the xml code.. I suggest to read the forum topic..

http://forum.freeflux.net/index.php?t=rview&goto=764

bye!

Insomma, si sta parlando di ajax (io ho smosso un pò la polvere.. fuxci c'ha messo pure mano però..e già è qualcosa credo) si sta parlando di quanto questa j2ee sia veramente adeguata al web.. ma ne abbiamo proprio bisogno?.. certo ci da il pane.. ma mi sa che il pupazzaro possiede ancora, in un certo senso, il futuro del web.. si tornerà indietro?

Beh, un'occhiata a Ruby on Rails..(Rubini su Rotaie..teribbile!) ve la consiglio... cioè a me lo ha consigliato un giovane sviluppatore Svizzero Raven (raven.ch stanno avanti lassù) e visti i progetti realizzati da questo ragazzo un pò di credito glielo darei :-)



E' un nuovo framework MVC leggero e veloce da usare (si parla di tempi di sviluppo ridottissimi rispetto a j2ee con analoga potenza e scalabilità). Inoltre integra delle api ajax, grazie a Prototype.

Poi dato che ci deve essere sempre una giusta critica leggetevi questa discussione sul confronto di j2ee con gli "obsoleti?" Phyton, php e con il nuovo Ruby on Rails su questo blog: j2ee vs Ruby on Rails

Insomma... lo so, lo so.. ci sono tante altre cose nella vita.. ma cmq... ogni tanto giusto per far vedere che uno non indossa i copri avambracci con la visiera nera in testa no?.. :-)

"Turn your comments into conversations,
no blog needed, just participate!" [www.cocomment.com]


Allora... siete entrati nel magico mondo dei blog? avete inizato a scrivere i vostri commenti a destra e a manca? Vi ricordate sempre cosa avete scritto e dove? beati voi! Per chi come me invece non ricorda mai un nome e perde minuti su motori di ricerca per ritrovare un certo blog, è nato questo fantastico servizio... il COCOMMENT... che non è una nuova forma di contratto a progetto ;-)





Questo servizio consente (sui blog seri, come Ax & The Crew :-), compatibili a tale genialata.. ) di tenere traccia di tutti i propri interventi sparsi per il blogspazio in una propria pagina... in questo modo per seguire una o piu discussioni potete saltare da un sito all'altro direttamente dal vostro diario personale... allora su.. non siate pigri... andate e "tracciatene tutti"

That's really a very good project! I think that the technology used in this site is really a step ahead in web page interaction!

Let's try it to http://www31.meebo.com/.. and... How about it, cool isn't it?



Follow this link to Wikipedia to know what is AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML)... come one developers.. come on!

I realized this project for my graduation thesis in Computer Science at the University of Rome "La Sapienza", May 2005


Description

This application is a WYSIWYG Browser Based editor, for documents realized in the LMML format.
LMML (Learning Material Markup Language) is a specific XML dialect defined for didactic documentation.

With AXEL is possible to create LMML documents in an easy way. It gives the possibility to insert specific XML tags using specific widget identified with intuitive icons.
The WYSIWYG editing environment allows a permissive “semantic” editing, always consistent with the LMML structural bounds and specifications.

Technologies used in AXEL

The appropriate use of the following technologies make AXEL to be considered, at the same time, either a Desktop Native application or a Web Application

XML, XUL, XBL, javaScript, Mozilla Gecko Browser Engine, XSL, CSS, XHTML, Java Servlet.

Where and How to use it

It’s possible to use the editor directly from your filesystem, creating and saving your own documents locally. Otherwise, if AXEL is configured as a Web Application and inserted into a Learning Management System, an user that browses online a LMML course page, could update "semantically” each content of the current page, also adding multimedia contents, finally saving everything back to the server.


Current development status

Actually some new features are added in AXEL, and are currently under development.
Some of these features concern the possibility to insert scaffolding contents and test session into the document, bringing in this way simple documents to a more interactive and adaptive e-learning enviroment


Screenshots

Go to Axel Italian Manual


Online working Prototype :-)

Try the online demo, for Firefox users only!
(Doesn't work on Firefox 1.5+, Browser bug 141987 on text selection in XUL applications).