Alin Voinea

EEA Annotator - Inline comments for Plone

2014-02-21T08:11:00.004-08:00

EEA Annotator is the Plone integration of http://okfnlabs.org/annotator/ which allows your editors to easily collaborate on a Plone document by adding annotations (inline comments) on it.

Today we release version 2.0 and bellow you can find a quick demo of this package.

Find more details on PyPi, Plone.org or EEA on GitHub

EEA Daviz (Plone add-on)

2014-02-07T05:05:00.000-08:00

EEA Daviz is a web tool which helps creating interactive data visualizations easily through the web browser, no extra tools are necessary. It is free and open source.

These days we managed to put together a series of screen-casts and publish them on EEA Web Systems Training's YouTube channel.

They are organized in two main section for basic users and advanced ones.

EEA Progress Bar (Plone Add-on)

2013-11-22T09:42:00.001-08:00

EEA Progress Bar is a Plone add-on that visually display a workflow percentage bar or a workflow steps trail in the publishing process of a document according with the workflow state in which the document is.

Today we release version 2.0 and bellow you can find a quick demo of this package.

Find more details on PyPi, Plone.org or EEA on GitHub

Installing Python 2.4 with-zlib on Debian squeeze

2012-10-26T01:39:00.001-07:00

Yap, it’s not as easy as it is supposed to be.

1. First of all make sure you have installed zlib-dev library, which in Debian/Ubuntu is called zlib1-dev:

$ sudo aptitude install zlib1-dev

Download Python from http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.4.6/

$ cd /tmp
$ wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.4.6/Python-2.4.6.tgz

Decompress it:

$ tar -zxvf Python-2.4.6.tgz

4. Compile it. STOP, I did that 10 times already with and without –with-zlib=/usr/include option, nothing, only a lot of frustration. So here is the key:

$ cd /lib
$ sudo ln -s x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so.1 libz.so

Now compile and install python:

$ cd /tmp/Python-2.4.6
$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/python24
$ make
$ make install

Test if zlib is installed:

$ /opt/python24/bin/python -c "import zlib"

Enjoy :o)

Writing solid and extensible jQuery plugins

2012-09-13T14:57:00.001-07:00

Personally, I don’t like the way jquery.com encourages you to write plugins, as it’s easy to end up with a large spaghetti plate even if you’re not living in Italy :)

Despite the fact that I am a Python geek and Python is about doing things neatly and quickly with no more than one namespace - just kidding - I still like classes, instances, interfaces, utilities and adapters - this may be due to the fact that for the past 7 years I’ve worked mainly with Zope and Zope Components.

Thus, after 4 years of adding life to my work by using JavaScript I’m ready to show you a very powerful way of writing JavaScript code and hence, jQuery plugins.

First of all let me share with you the following statement from The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters:

Namespaces are one honking great idea – let’s do more of those!

Why not also apply this when writing JavaScript code? Here is how we start: we define our top namespace, safely, in order to allow it to be extended later outside this JS file:

if(!window.Alien){
  var Alien = {"version": "1.0"};
}

At this point, we begin to add our plugins:

Alien.Ship = function(context, options){
  var self = this;
  self.context = context;

  self.settings = {
    width: 800,
    height: 600
  };

  if(options){
    jQuery.extend(self.settings, options);
  }

  self.initialize();
};

Now that we’ve added our constructor, let’s make it possible to instantiate it with the new JS keyword:

 Alien.Ship.prototype = {
  initialize: function(){
    var self = this;

    // Bind some events
    self.context.bind('width-changed', function(evt, data){
      self.handle_width(data);
    });

    self.context.bind('height-changed', function(evt, data){
      self.handle_height(data);
    });

    // Do some initialization
    self.context.css('background-color', 'gray');
  },


  handle_width: function(data){
    var self = this;
    self.settings.width = data.width;
  },

  handle_height: function(data){
    var self = this;
    self.settings.height = data.height;
  }
};

OK, but where is the jQuery plugin? Well, here it is:

jQuery.fn.AlienShip = function(options){
  return this.each(function(){
    var context = jQuery(this);
    var ship = new Alien.Ship(context, options);
    context.data('AlienShip', ship);
  });
};

By using this, we have the power of a jQuery plugin mixed with the flexibility of the prototype object from JavaScript.

It’s easy to call it:

jQuery('.car').AlienShip({width: 1024, height: 800});

It easy to access it:

jQuery('.car').data('AlienShip').settings.width;

And it’s easy to extend it:

Alien.Ship.prototype.handle_width = function(data){
  var self = this;
  self.settings.width = data.width / 2;
};

Download this full javascript file