Dave's Thoughts

Tablet from Lenovo (and others) out of CES

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:42:00 +0000

A coworker send a link on new tablet/hybrid devices shown at CES. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5DYuVN6nuY. I gotta say, nice new form factor for the netbooks.

Religious debate about Apple versus the world aside. There will be a place for low priced computer with touch capabilities with full keyboard. This concept has been around for a long time: see http://shop.lenovo.com/us/notebooks/thinkpad/x-series-tablet. We've seen this 5 years ago. The potential market will be the same around the type of people that buys this.

I don't know how long we've been hearing about ipod, iphone, ipad killers. And nothing has succeeded. The reason for Apple's success has to do with the Apple's core capabilities on creating an arbitrary need and paint a picture for the every day consumers. They get people who 5 years ago would never buy a tablet PC, to say "I need this". People want Apple stuff. Not because of features, and technology, but because of ease of use, ecosystem, addressing simple problems and successful marketing campaigns. Doctors, Dentists, Judges are imagining what their world could be with Apple. While everyone is playing catch up.

That being said, the landscape is leveling. Android is creating a platform that's almost as easy to use. With combined push of all the other phone manufacturers (other than Apple), is making a significant dent in market share. The share isn't coming at the expense of Apple, but from Research in Motion and Nokia, who were previously the dominating player in smart phone, and cell phone markets world wide. I think the market place will reach towards saturation and equilibrium. Then new categories are invented, and it starts all over again.

Note, success of Android also points to Apple's core flaw. Apple wants control. Apple's stance on control has been around quality. I speculate there's economic reasons as well for control. Their rejection of google voice, skype VOIP into the app store. Refusal on allowing flash to work on iOS devices are all about control. In the past year, we've seen Apple relax their stance on control. Now Google voice and Skype is available for iOS devices. Flash, I am still waiting for.

David in Vancouver.

Delicious Cuban food @ Delicias de Alicia

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 05:15:00 +0000

With a modest decor, the food here is flavorful, cheap and unique.
They are located at 4854 imperial st in Burnaby. Took a picture of the
fried plantain. Yum yum! Thanks @Magemadness for recommending this.

"Change your default facebook picture to a cartoon from your childhood. The goal? To not see a human face on facebook until Monday the 6th of Dec. Join the fight against child abuse, and invite your friends to do the same!"

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 20:27:00 +0000

Adobe Max 2010

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 01:32:00 +0000

I missed Adobe MAX this year. First time I've missed it since Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005. Going through the online keynote, seems like it was great tech conference filled with gadgets and freebies.

The key of this Max conference was devices. Adobe is offering a suite of tools to help designers and develop engage in a world to target multiple media and devices; from laptops/desktops, to tablets, to phones, to TV's. All these things, one platform, to make things faster, better, cheaper.

The key isn't tools. The key is people that use the tools:

The creative that thinks about how users engage with their devices, and come up with an innovative way to interact, and to reach out and communicate.

The inquisitive that questions why things need to be done a certain way. Is there a better approach?

The methodical that architects and ensure what we are building is consistent, and sound.

The key is people that makes everything happen, and possible.

Adobe embraces this, and makes customer and user experience a primary goal of the tools, of the platform. I can't wait to see what is possible in a world of human innovation and interaction.

Dave in Vancouver

Where to go for good seafood paella?

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 05:47:00 +0000

> Going through the pictures on my phone took during the honeymoon. > One of the most memorable dish is the seafood paella at barcelona. > This is the sea on a plate. Where can I find
> this in Vancouver?

Pooling is your friend

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 22:16:00 +0000

Been trouble shooting performance issue on a client's server for some time now. The problem was that under heavy load, the jvm would eventually run out of heap, or the database connections ran out. I tried various JVM settings to see if i can force garbage collection to occur more frequently, but all to the same result. Our LiveCycle server wasn't able to sustain the load and dies.

Turns out that this was easily fixable by setting the pooling settings for the services inside of adminui. By setting to use pooled instances only, and a minimum and maximum pool size, we got a much more stable environment. Consequently, the garbage collection also occurred much more frequently. Under load, the LiveCycle Server didn't run out of heap space either!

To modify pooling for a service:

1. Login to admin ui
2. Click on services
3. Select application and services
4. Select service management
5. Find the process / service that you created
6. Click on pooling. update as follows

- Use pooled instance for all requests
- Initial service instance pool size set to average number of concurrent transactions expected.
- max service instance pool size set to maximum number of concurrent transactions expected
- maximum async service instance is set to 0
- invocation wait time out is set to 0.

This setting worked so far for us. I will update the blog if that's not the case.

David

LiveCycle WebSphere Database Connectivity

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 02:04:00 +0000

Just want to document this in case anyone else runs into issue:

Problem:
- You are trying to initialize the database on WebSphere 6.1.0.19 or higher but the initialization step failed. When you look at the log, you see bunch of these: Caused by: com.ibm.ws.Transaction.IllegalResourceIn2PCTransactionException: Illegal attempt to enlist multiple 1PC XAResources

Note: this may cause problems for folks who had an earlier installation of WebSphere 6.1.0.7, installed LiveCycle, then tried to patch WebSphere up to 6.1.0.19. You will see the Illegal attempt to enlist multiple 1PX XAResources. This may cause instability in your system. I would recommend updating to use the solution below.

Reason:
- In a version between 6.1.0.7 and 6.1.0.19, WebSphere depends to be smart, and try to identify the GenericDataStoreHelper class by looking into the JDBC libraries. So the default DataStore helper class is set to the specific one for the driver, for e.g. MicrosoftSQLServerDataStoreHelper, instead of the GenericDataStoreHelper.

Resolution:
1. login to websphere admin console (http://localhost:9080/admin)
2. Click on resources > data sources
3. click on IDP_DS,
4. For datastore helper class, select to use a custom one, and type the following in: com.ibm.websphere.rsadapter.GenericDataStoreHelper
5. repeat for EDC_DS
6. test data connections
7. run through initialize database from livecycle configuration manager (/opt/adobe/LiveCycle8.2/ConfigurationManager/bin/configurationManager.sh

Setting JBOSS to leverage database fail over

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:18:00 +0000

We have a client who runs a clustered SQL Server instance leveraging a clustered JBOSS environment. We ran into problems in LiveCycle when the client fails over the database server from one node to the other. What we ended up doing is to set up jboss to round-robin a set of database connection URL, such that when one fails, it will try the other connection string. Here's how to set up the adobe-ds.xml and mssql-ds.xml to support database fail over:

<datasources>
<ha-local-tx-datasource>
<jndi-name>IDP_DS</jndi-name>
<connection-url>jdbc:sqlserver://DBSERVER1:PORT;DatabaseName=DBNAME|sqlserver://DBSERVER2:PORT;DatabaseName=DBNAME</connection-url>
<url-delimeter>|</url-delimeter>
<driver-class>com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver</driver-class>

<connection-property name="autoReconnect">true</connection-property>
<connection-property name="maxReconnects">10</connection-property>
<connection-property name="initialTimeout">10</connection-property>
<user-name>DBUSER</user-name>
<password>DBPASSWORD</password>
<min-pool-size>1</min-pool-size>
<max-pool-size>30</max-pool-size>
<blocking-timeout-millis>60000</blocking-timeout-millis>
<idle-timeout-minutes>10</idle-timeout-minutes>
<prepared-statement-cache-size>100</prepared-statement-cache-size>
<transaction-isolation>TRANSACTION_READ_COMMITTED</transaction-isolation>


<check-valid-connection-sql>select count(*) from edcprincipalentity</check-valid-connection-sql>


<metadata>
<type-mapping>MS SQLSERVER2000</type-mapping>
</metadata>
</ha-local-tx-datasource>
</datasources>

Ensemble Tofino FAQ and new build

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 07:15:00 +0000

We get some common questions in our support email for tofino (tofinosupport@ensemble.com). Here's answer to some of them. But definitely send any support issues to the email address, we will do our best to address them.

- Ensemble Tofino is free, and will continue to be free.
- Ensemble Tofino requires Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (Standard edition and up). There's currently no support for shell editions.
- There's no current plan for a design view, but keep sending those requests to the support email though. Always love to hear how people are using Tofino.
- Flex consulting requests can go through services@ensemble.com

New build available here. Some highlights from the change log:

1.2009.03.04
- TOF-236: use better java heap defaults
- TOF-237: Intellisense lagging for large files
- TOF-238: trace( and stage auto-complete to Trace( and Stage
- TOF-239: intellisense swallows space char when it shouldn't

1.2009.02.10
- TOF-113: Implement "Project from Existing Code..."
- TOF-230: fix build crashes due to limited memory
- TOF-231: auto-complete, auto-align, auto-highlight MXML end tags
- TOF-232: control-] does not move to matching token

1.2009.02.02
- bug fixes:
- TOF-89: object browser NavigateTo() should open item in browser
- TOF-97: make type refs in object browser signatures be hyper links
- TOF-98: have "small" constant values show in the full signature in the object browser
- TOF-196: make long builds be cancellable
- TOF-199: improve local debug/intellisense tooltip and watch displays
- TOF-207: project building always expands the entire solution explorer
- TOF-212: make code-completion more automatic
- TOF-213: add useful keywords in code completion menus
- TOF-214: navigation/code completion should work with unsaved parse trees
- TOF-215: Support Flash Player Version defined in project property
- TOF-218: annoying build warning: Failed to match the compile target
- TOF-221: auto align braces as they are typed
- TOF-225: debugger crash when setting an invalid breakpoint
- TOF-224: forbid setting multiple breakpoints on the same line of code

David - in Vancouver

New tutorial created around building Flex application in Visual Studio utilziing Ensemble Tofino

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:29:00 +0000

Matt Wicks has created a tutorial content around building a flex application using Ensemble Tofino posted at DeveloperFusion. Take a look here and help get started on Flex in Visual Studio. Anyone running into issues around Ensemble Tofino, questions around consulting, feel free to contact tofinosupport@ensemble.com

David in rainy Vancouver.

Ensemble Tofino for Visual Studio - Enabling Flex for .NET

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 04:10:00 +0000

New release of Ensemble Tofino is now available at our company's website here. The latest release includes features such as:
- intellisense code completion for Action Script and MXML sources
- debugging flex applications
- object browser now has type references as active hyperlinks
- "show all files" for flex projects in the solution explorer
- comes in 2 variants, one with rebundled Flex SDK, and one without
- Options page added. Access the options page via Tools > Options > Projects > Flex Projects
- "Go to definition" in Flex sources and object browser
- and many more

For complete change log, please go here.

For support questions, please send them to tofinosupport@ensemble.com.

Tofino is available for free.

Happy coding and merry Christmas/Happy holidays!

Dave in snowy vancouver.

Just posted a session for MAX2008

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Tue, 27 May 2008 23:03:00 +0000

Being the procrastinator that I am, I finally got around to posting a session for MAX 2008. The sesion will be about how to built a collaborative review solution using Adobe AIR and LiveCycle. The solution has 3 components: AIR client, LiveCycle backend services, and a repository for storing content and comments. During the session, I will talk about high level architecture, implementation details, and showcase bunch of demos. (starting from a multitude of assets, leveraging Adobe's shared review capabilities, and use LiveCycle as the orchestration engine.)

For others who wants to present, go to https://adobemax.dabbledb.com/page/callforsessions/NLXYueHm and suggest a session before the deadline tonight.

See you all in San Fran.

David

Enable SSL for LiveCycle Rights Management for cheap

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:15:00 +0000

LiveCycle Rights Management ES which protects PDF documents with revokable policies, requires an SSL certificate to ensure communication between PDF and the server is secured. In the past, we typically use a self signed certificates for development purposes, until the project is ready for production. Unfortunately, most trusted CA signed SSL certificates tends to be quite expensive.

I didn't know about this until recently, but inexpensive SSL certificates ($30 USD / year) can be used. P.s. I am not affiliated with GoDaddy. If you find other cheap and trusted CA, feel free to post in the comments.

I was a bit skeptical about whether the root certificate is trusted in the browser and in various OS's. Of the machines i tried, it seems to work fine. So below is a brief end to end instructions on how to enable your Rights Management ES instance (jboss) using a trusted CA signed certificate.

Step 1: Generate java keystore

Step 2: Generate certificate request

Step 3: purchase a Standard SSL certificate
Follow instructions provided by the CA, and paste certificate signing request when requested.

Step 4: importing the various certificates into your java keystore
After successfully purchasing a certificate, you will be sent a set of certificates. A root, a chain, an intermediate, and your site certificate. Follow the instructions below to import the certificates into your keystore.

Step 5: update server.xml

First copy the .keystore into a known location. I used JBOSS_HOME\server\all\conf. Then update the server.xml located at JBOSS_HOME\server\all\deploy\jbossweb-tomcat55.sar as below.

New COLLADA flex sample based on Away3D

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:05:00 +0000

Finally got around to posting a COLLADA viewer that we built based on modified version of Away 3D. The component was put together to support viewing 3D models based on the COLLADA standard within a Flex application.

Changes include:

- Implement a flex component for the AWAY3d rendering engine.
- Hover/Zoom navigation support using custom targeted hover camera (hold down shift OR ctrl on top of the model viewer).
- Added simple material and lighting support to the COLLADA parser.
- Added materials preloading support.

The reason behind building this component is that we wanted to support viewing and interacting with a 3D model for a flex application. We also wanted to ensure that existing 3d models can be reused. Some of our envisioned usage scenarios below:

- interacting with a Air Plane or Car Model for a technician to document repairs and issues done (visual maintenance record).
- review architecture and design decisions for a building amongst architects, and developers.
- etc...

The viewing part was handled, but interacting will require a bit more work. The source code and samples have been posted. Feel free to upgrade / migrate to the latest AWAY 3D and/or merge the changes into Papervision 3d (PV3D).

To view a demo of the viewer in action here. The samples page on our website here, including a download for project source.

Cheers,

David

Be a rebel...

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 10:14:00 +0000

I needed to validate LiveCycle ES 8.0.1 against Windows 2003 R2 - 64 bit and SQL 2000 Server. According to the install documentation (pg13) , this is a big no no.:

Intel x86 compatibilityOn supported Windows and Linux environments, LiveCycle ES supports Intel EDT64 and AMD64 compatible chipsets, but the operating system must be 32 bit.

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition or Standard Edition SP1 and R2 (32-bit edition only)

Good news!

The installation and configuration went basically flawlessly. The only thing I ran into problem with was the JDBC Driver.

I started the installation process using: SQL Server 2000 Driver for JDBC Service Pack 3 . Unfortunately I ran into some SQL issues during start up of my jboss app server. Specifically I got the "Can't start manual transaction mode because there are cloned connections". After a bit of googling, this turns out to be a problem with Microsoft Type 4 JDBC Driver and concurrent statements, transactions, or result sets on the same database connection. The resolution was to pass in "SelectMethod=cursor" in my connection string. I didn't like this very much, since SelectMethod=cursor potentially has performance impact.

After further researching, it turns out that the SQL Server 2005 JDBC Driver 1.2 supports SQL Server 2000 as well as 2005. Using this driver my connection issue went away, and I was unable to successfully complete the rest of my configuration steps for LCES.

The specifics of my environment below. Hopefully this may potentially help some of you.

Hardware: AMD X2 5600+ , 8GB of RAM
OS: Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition R2, 64 Bit
Java: JDK 1.5.0_13-windows-amd64
Database (on a remote machine): SQL 2000 Server SP4 on a Windows 2003 Enterprise (32bit)

Notes:
- Use the latest JDBC Drivers from Microsoft. Version 1.2 of the JDBC Driver was released recently, and my preliminary tests (Reader Extensions, create sample policies) worked without any issues.
- Set database to authenticate against mix mode (SQL Server and Windows authentication)
- Watch out for driver-class in adobe-ds.xml and mssql-ds.xml. I double checked by extracting the jar file to see what the path is.

Happy installation :-)

rise from the ashes ;)

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 10:15:00 +0000

Been a while since I've posted... some updates over the course of next few days:

1. Currently experimenting with installing LiveCycle ES 8.0.1 on an 64 bit OS. Officially it's unsupported. I am keeping my fingers crossed that A) Java's abstracted well enough from the OS layer that this is a non-issue. B) LiveCycle 8 is purely Java, failing that C) Windows 2003's 32 bit emulation mechanism is good enough.

I should have an answer tomorrow.. Keep reading :)

2. Some folks in our office spent quite a few weeks trying out install and configuration documentation for Clustering on LiveCycle ES. Version 8 is so much easier to install and configure in a cluster than previous releases. There are a few caveats to watch out for in *unix based environments. Specifically this has to do with the GlobalStorageDirectory properties during the installation step. I will share some of the problems we ran into, and our workarounds in a follow up post. For those who needs specific help, send me an email at davidl AT ensemble dot com.

LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (ES) preview release

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 26 May 2007 06:21:00 +0000

LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (ES) preview release is available for download from http://www.adobe.com/devnet/livecycle/espreview/ . Yes folks, this is the next version of LiveCycle.

Some of the changes in LiveCycle are quite significant in this release. Notable features include:

Installation and Configuration

consistent installation and configuration experience from a single installer.
better support at detecting environment settings and automatic deployment of LiveCycle ES onto the app servers.
Support of the latest app servers and databases.

I had a lot of experience installing LiveCycle: from Windows, to Linux, to AIX; from JBOSS, to WebSphere to Weblogic; and using the default MySQL, to SQL Server to Oracle. A little too much, to my liking. ES has came a long way in terms of installation and configuration from the old LiveCycle 6 days. There's a single installer (yah!), with a place to enter all your serials or suite serials without having to worried about product compatibility or order of installation within the platform. This is a huge improvement. There are some still hiccups with regards to deploying ES apps onto the application server, but I am sure these will be addressed in the production version.

Designer ES

[New feature] Form Guide, a flash based wizard constructed with the same PDF template (xdp and pdf).
[New Feature] Form Fragments, xdp concept that allows fragments to be reuse across different templates.

Form Guide is an excellent first step towards marrying Flex and LiveCycle. It provides an intuitive GUI to build a wizard from your pdf and xdp files, while keeping the data model consistent. This means that data inputted in the flex form guide can be used to populate the pdf form with zero effort. That being said, i have a few comments and feature requests to LiveCycle product team:

- Let me overwrite and update the generated MXML code. This will allow finer grained control over the user experience and look and feel of the UI.

- Guide preview currently generates the swf in a default location. Let me specify where to put this. Or better, place in a sub-folder from where the xdp/pdf template is.

- The preview in the guide builder doesn't open the PDF? It's pointing to a default PDF.

- I am quite excited about Form Fragments. In many of our large form projects, we could have used something exactly like this. Form fragments allows you to create, say a company header, or a mortgage calculator object and reuse across all forms. How is this different from a custom XFO? Well, when you insert an XFO, a static copy is inserted into your form. Any updates to the XFO will need to be updated in all form instances. This is not true for form fragments. Since XDP with form fragments contains a reference to the fragment, any updates to the fragment will be dynamically picked up by ALL form instances. This is a big win in terms of form maintainability.

LiveCycle ES Document Services

LiveCycle Forms ES can generate a form guide from the XDP template
Better and consistent Java API support across the board. Remote java calls now supported for Reader Extensions. We used to have to write a webservices wrapper for Reader Extensions.
Better and consistent SOAP API support across the board.

Workbench ES

Eclipse based development environment for building your form, and processes.
Re-skinned, and much improved workflow designer in terms of user experience.
Drag and drop support to add files into the repository for consumption by the processes.

Usability for Workflow designer is much better in ES. I also liked the fact that there's a consistent developer interface, for form developer, process developer, or application developer. Flex builder plug-in for eclipse should be available optionally, and plug-able into Workbench.

Process Management and Workflow

additional invocation methods to all services supported by default, including watch folder, email, java, soap, and remoting (flash remoting).
[New Feature] Workspace to replace LiveCycle Form Manager. Workspace is a Flex application that allows user to initiate and participate in processes.

This is actually really cool. Instead of being limited to using a PDF Form to trigger a process, ES supports additional invocation methods out of the box: watch folder, and email. What this means, is that processes can be triggered by copying a file into a watched folder, or an email to a specific address. This is true for all services that you create, or available out of the box.

There are alot of new and exciting features in LiveCycle ES that makes a lot of sense for developers who are currently on the 7.x platform, as well as new organizations that want to adopt LiveCycle into their business processes.

New LiveCycle Samples (with source code)

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Mon, 14 May 2007 07:44:00 +0000

There are 3 additional LiveCycle samples that we have made available at our website.

The first sample utilizes Reader Extensions and Assembler to cover the scenario of enabling a pdf document for review, then compare and merge the comments using Assembler.

The second sample goes through various mechanisms for validating a PDF form before additional processing can occur. Three specific approaches were illustrated: LiveCycle Forms API (processFormSubmission()), LiveCycle Reader Extensions API (exportFormData()), and XPAAJ (exportFormData()).

Finally, the last sample shows how to apply a policy on a PDF document.

The samples can be found at http://www.ensemble.com/samples/adobe/livecycle

David

Considerations when building an eform solution using LiveCycle - part 2

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 17:38:00 +0000

Continue'd from last part

5. Volume
What is the anticipated volume of electronic submissions expected? Simultaneous submissions? If large and simultaneous submissions are expected, then you want to leverage a JMS queue to handle the submission part. The downside to this is that results can not be returned to the user synchronously.

The other approach is to leverage clustering of your web / application server. This will result in better performance as well as a more reliable solution. Unfortunately there is a cost associated with clustering (software licenses and hardware).

6. Paper based submissions?
Are there times in which the signed paper forms are required for legality reasons? This is found in particular in heavily regulated industries (financial institutions and government organizations). If you require to keep a copy of the signed paper forms, then at design time, you want to consider leveraging 2D Barcode. The way the 2D Barcode works is that as you enter data using Reader / Acrobat, the data is being encoded into the Barcode. The data by default is encrypted. To decrypt the 2d barcode, you would need 1) reader extensions rights 2) barcode decoder from Adobe 3) Acrobat to print the barcoded forms.

Let me know if you have other questions in the comments area, I will do my best to include them in my post.

David

Considerations when building an electronic form (eForm) solution using LiveCycle - Part1

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 16:09:00 +0000

This article is intended for those who are interested in migrating your existing paper based processes over to an electronic one. I will go through some high level considerations in finding the right solution.

1. PDF or HTML?
Are you interested in implementing a pure PDF solution or one that includes both HTML and PDF? LiveCycle Forms allows multiple output formats (PDF, PDF Form, HTML, DHTML, AHTML, etc) to be generated from a single template (.xdp) created from LiveCycle Designer. The caveat is that the scripting behavior is different between the HTML and PDF, resulting in scripts that has to be coded into the templates. Unless there's a significant requirement to continue to support HTML based forms, I would stick with PDF Forms.

2. When is HTML Form an appropriate output from LiveCycle Forms?
Scenario 1: If the PDF form is very long (5-10 pages), I sometimes use HTML Forms to capture data, in a multiple step wizard. This breaks the long time into a sequence of smaller and more focused forms for the user to fill out.

Scenario 2: Use HTML Forms when screen real-estate becomes a high premium (within a portal, within LiveCycle Form Manager)

3. Requirements to archive the PDF?
Do you have existing requirement to archive the PDF that the user submits? If yes, then the submit type needs to be either XDP or PDF. This is done at the form design stage. Note, to support this capabilities using Adobe Reader, the PDF needs to be reader-extended first. (Product: LiveCycle Reader Extensions)

4. Requirements to use digital signature?
Are you planning to support digital signatures in your PDF Form? If that's the case, you should be aware that an existing PKI infrastructure and/or support for roaming certificates / id needs to be there to associate and identify the signing party. Also, if digital signatures are required, the submission type (of submit buttons on the PDF) has to be an XDP aor a PDF.

to be continued..

Gmail on the desktop? Sign me up!

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 05:22:00 +0000

Leslie at jinsync.com released an apollo gmail app that showcased how easily existing AJAX application can be wrapped and deployed onto the desktop. The concept is very simple, use the HTML capabilities within apollo sdk to wrap around an existing web site. Many will say, "so what? I can just bookmark gmail using my browser, and place a link on my desktop as well." Now, look at apollo's documentation. Offline capabilities support within the SDK. Add caching and offline capabilities onto the existing AJAX-based gmail, and you will have a powerful desktop emailing tool without significant rewrite of the entire code base.

Google, pay attention. With Apollo, gmail can be a desktop email client that is cross platform, based on the same code base as the existing web version, and ready to be deployed within a couple of weeks.

Apollo is released on Adobe labs!

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 06:05:00 +0000

Apollo has been released on Adobe labs at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/ ! Get it while it's hot. For those of you who doesn't know, Apollo is the code name for cross platform runtime from Adobe, that allow developers to use familar web technologies (flex, ajax, css, html) to build compelling rich client applications.

How to automate testing of PDF based form solutions?

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 19:45:00 +0000

With the increased adoption of fillable PDF forms for government agencies and corporations, there is a need to automate the testing process of online applications that includes PDF Forms. How is this accomplished?

Use the testing tool and example provided on Adobe LiveCycle Developer center. Note, the PDF form tester toolkit contains C, Java, JUnit, Robot, RobotJ, and VB Examples. This should allow adoption of these samples into any existing test framework.

David in Vancouver

LiveCycle Workflow Tutorials

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 18:31:00 +0000

For those interested, there is a series of LiveCycle Workflow tutorial posted on my company's site here.

This tutorial shows you how to implement a process using Adobe LiveCycle Workflow. The thirteen parts step you through changing an existing paper process for expense reports into a completely electronic process.

The following topics are covered:

1. Adding LiveCycle Workflow fields to the form
2. Uploading the form to LiveCycle Form Manager
3. Linking the form to a category
4. Identifying the form as initiator of a workflow
5. Initiating a workflow by submitting the form
6. Assign the form to a group of users
7. Render the submitted form as a PDF
8. Use route names as choice-list items
9. Split workflows into parallel branches of tasks
10. Save the form as PDF in the file system
11. Insert the form data into a database
12. Look up the originator's e-mail address
13. Importing the sample workflow

Cheers,

David

Changing the paradigm - new user interaction

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 00:53:00 +0000

Go to here to view a more extended display of multi touch system from Jeff Han. He originally displayed the multi-touch system at TED conference in 2006. This technology alone, can change the way humans interact with machines. More information at the tip of your finger tips and hopefully reduce the number of RSI.