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Slides from the NoSQL Meetup and ApacheCon US 09

dev@day.com (Michael Marth) — 9 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

ApacheCon US 09 in Oakland and the NoSQL meetup are over. Find below the slides of the talks given by Day's engineers covering Apache projects Sling, Jackrabbit, Tika and POI as well as OSGi.

Bertrand Delacretaz: JCR In 10 Minutes

View more documents from bdelacretaz.

Bertrand Delacretaz: Life in Open Source Communities

View more documents from bdelacretaz.

Carsten Ziegeler: JCR In Action

View more documents from Carsten Ziegeler.

Carsten Ziegeler: Embrace Change - Embrace OSGi

View more documents from Carsten Ziegeler.

Felix Meschberger: Rapid JCR Applications Development with Sling

View more presentations from Felix Meschberger.

Jukka Zitting: Mime Magic With Apache Tika

View more presentations from Jukka Zitting.

Paolo Mottadelli: Apache Poi Recipes

View more documents from Paolo Mottadelli.

JBoye Presentation: WCM Trends for 2010

dev@day.com (David Nuescheler) — 05 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Today I had the opportunity to speak at the JBoye conference in Aarhus. It was a pleasure as every year since the audience and speakers really constitutes a who-is-who of WCM visionaries and insiders. I am definitely looking forward to coming back next year.

JBoye Presentation: WCM Trends for 2010

View more documents from David Nuescheler.

Ask the community: TibTec

dev@day.com (Michael Marth) — 04 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

The Tuberculosis Project project is one of the Sling users registered on the Sling user wiki page. This is an interview with developer Audrey Colbrant who worked on the project.

Audrey, can you please tell us a bit about the TibTec Tuberculosis Project? What are the project's aims and background?

The TB project is developed by Tibtec, a nonprofit technology center based in Dharamsala (India) and directed by M. Phuntsok DORJEE. The aim of the project was to build a system to monitor the tuberculosis among tibetan communities in India, Nepal and Bhutan. Thanks to technology advances in mobile and web computing, it is now possible to design a recording and reporting web portal supporting the WHO DOTS protocol.

The project of monitoring the tuberculosis among tibetan communities in India was born 1 year ago thanks to four actors: the DoH (Department of Health, Tibetan Government in Exile), Tibetan Delek Hospital (Gangchen Kyishong - India), AISPO (Italian Association for Solidarity Of Persons), and the Johns Hopkins University (USA). TibTec is working on a system for the above four actors.

The main goal of the project is to build a simple, low-cost and versatile framework so that communities all over the world could benefit from it. The system could be easily customized for other works as well since it based on open source software.

If you want to take a look at the architecture, follow the guide.

So how did you end up using Sling? Did you compare Sling against some other frameworks?

The implementation of the TB project was part of the master project in computer science of my university. Jacques Lemordant, researcher in the WAM project at INRIA was in contact with M. Dorjee, CEO of TibTec, since several years. Together they have defined headlines of the project and chosen the more efficient technologies to be used.

Sling was chosen because we are very familiar with XML technologies (RELAX NG, XPATH, XSLT...) and hierarchical representation of data.

Another point was the fact that we wanted to access data from Android (Apache http client) and a full REST API was the simplest way to access a JCR and manipulate data represented as trees. XML being very well supported in Android, Sling is a perfect match with Android to design agile mobile web framework.

Sling is also part of a course in mobile and web technologies as the master level of the University Joseph Fourier of Grenoble.

Now that you have completed an implementation project with Sling are there any lessons learned you would like to share with the community?

The Sling approach is fairly new and I haven’t seen any other same kind of approach before. The concept is simple but it takes a little bit time to be used to the utilization. So never give up, solutions come slowly with perseverance.

If you had one free wish from the Sling committers...

Sling is a very interesting and powerful way to work with resources but difficult to handle for Sling beginners when you have a full and composite website to implement, mostly because of the lack of information on the internet.

The harder thing that gives me a lot of headaches was to find a good syntax to use that changes according to the technology you mix up.

So I think it could be helpful to have more tutorials on the syntax to use in each different case, what is better to do or not, and advice on choices to take in programming (for example I have met choices for protecting the access to the repository; choices about which kind of link is better to use: reference or path, etc).

It could be also good to finalize all links of this useful webpage

NoSQL Meetup and ApacheCon 09 in Oakland

dev@day.com (Michael Marth) — 02 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

ApacheCon US 09 starts today in Oakland. A couple of Day's engineers will give talks, not just about the usual suspects Sling and Jackrabbit, but also Tika and POI (details below).

Also, Jukka Zitting has helped organize a NoSQL meetup in Oakland starting tonight where Bertrand Delacretaz will talk about JCR.

Bertrand Delacretaz: Life in Open Source communities: Open Source communities often seem to have their own unwritten rules of operation and communication, their own jargon and their own etiquette, which sometimes make them appear obscure and closed to outsiders. In this talk, we'll provide recommendations on how to get touch with, and how to join, Open Source communities. Based on ten years of experience in various Open Source projects, we will provide practical information on how to communicate effectively on mailing lists, how to formulate questions in an effective way, how to contribute in ways that add value to the project, and generally how to interact with Open Source communities in ways that are mutually beneficial. This talk will help Open Source beginners get closer to the communities that matter to them, and help more experienced community members understand how to welcome and guide newcomers.

Carsten Ziegeler: JCR in Action - Content-based Applications with Jackrabbit: The Java Content Repository API (JCR) is the ideal solution to store hierarchical structured content, and to develop content-oriented applications. This session provides a practical introduction to help you get started using JCR in your own application. To demonstrate the basic architecture of such applications, a sample content-based application will be developed during the session. Basic techniques will be explained, including navigation, searching, and observations, using the Apache Jackrabbit project.

Embrace OSGi - A Developer's Quickstart: In theory, the first choice for highly modular, dynamic, and extensible applications is OSGi technology. The theory sounds very tempting, but what about the real world? Starting with the basics of OSGi, this session is focused on practical examples, tools, and procedures for a rapid adoption of OSGi in your own projects. Learn how to avoid the typical traps and how to get the most out of OSGi

Felix Meschberger: Rapid JCR applications development with Sling: Apache Sling is an OSGi-based, scriptable applications layer, using REST principles, that runs on top of a JCR content repository. In this talk, we'll see how Sling enables rapid development of JCR-based content applications, by leveraging the JSR 223 scripting framework. We'll also look at the rich set of OSGi components provided by Sling. We will create a simple application from scratch in a few minutes, and explain a more complex multimedia application that does a lot with just a few lines of code. This talk will help you get started with Sling and understand how the different components fit together.

Jukka Zitting: MIME Magic with Apache Tika: Apache Tika aims to make it easier to extract metadata and structured text content from all kinds of files. Tika is a subproject of Apache Lucene, and leverages libraries like Apache POI and Apache PDFBox to provide a powerful yet simple interface for parsing dozens of document formats. This makes Tika an ideal companion for Apache Lucene, or for any search engine that needs to be able to index metadata and content from many different types of files. This presentation introduces Apache Tika and shows how it's being used in projects like Apache Solr and Apache Jackrabbit. You will learn how to integrate Tika with your application and how to configure and extend Tika to best suit your needs. The presentation also summarizes the key characteristics of the more widely used file formats and metadata standards, and shows how Tika can help deal with that complexity. The audience is expected to have basic understanding of Java programming and MIME media types.

Paolo Mottadelli: Apache POI recipes: The Apache POI project provides Open Source Java APIs for the manipulation of Microsoft Office format files. It was developed to provide OLE2 Compound Document format support. POI support for the new format was necessitated by the proliferation of new Office Open XML (OOXML) documents, due to its standardization. As a result, a common challenge emerged for projects that leverage POI to read and write Excel, Word, and PowerPoint documents: supporting the new format while maintaining backward compatibility with the earlier one. This session provides an overview of how the new POI architecture makes that challenge easier, using the common interfaces package and their double implementation. Participants will also learn about the main new features provided by POI towards support of the new OOXML format. To demonstrate POI's features, this session will also drive through a collection of practical recipes to solve the tough problems of integrating Office documents in your enterprise applications.

Author-centric feature scoping and integration

dev@day.com (Michael Marth) — 28 Oct 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Won't somebody please think of the ~~children~~ authors?
(almost Helen Lovejoy)

Have you seen the component for multi-variate testing (MVT, aka A/B testing) in the upcoming CQ5.3 release? I saw it demoed by David at Ignite and was completely blown away: CMS users (authors) can simply drag a couple of alternative banners onto the component right from within their regular editing interface (the CMS will then show the different versions to different users and count the click-through rates so that eventually the best performing banner is determined).

The MVT feature reminded me of two other CQ5 features: personalisation and analytics. All three are truly and seamlessly integrated into the user interface of the authors and they all provide less functionality than full-blown standalone solutions. To give you a concrete example: for each page the editors see right in the site admin (i.e. in their daily user interface) how many views each page got in the last 30 days. Clearly, this is no match for the kinds of reports you get on, say, Google Analytics, not even the same ballpark. Yet, I still think the authors get something that is valuable for them: they see it right away what is of interest to their audience.

(there is screencast available that demonstrates personalisation features from an author's perspective, registration needed)

When I compare this author-centric evaluation of functionality with my usual point of view as a system architect the business value of a feature for an author might be determined by:

ease of use rather than feature richness and
seamless integration into the UI

This is probably true for most systems that have non-technical users, but I believe the effect is amplified in CMSs because many CMS users use the system only once in a while rather than regularly.

Of course, this author-centric view on features should not necessarily dictate the underlaying systems architecture especially when you look at a complete content management solution encompassing analytics, personalization etc. The architecture might still be full-stack or best-of-breed and I do not want to postulate one being better than the other. However, I believe that one way of knowing that you got the author's user experience right is when you cannot see the system architecture reflected in the UI anymore. Or to put it the other way round: the UI should not enable you to guess which box which feature is running on.(*)

Thanks to Lars for providing discussions and ideas on this post.

(*) This idea is adjacent to a pet subject of mine: the user interface for basic content management (CRUD stuff) should not enable you to guess the underlying content/data schema. Sadly, up to today not few CMSs UIs resemble ERP-style data entry masks.

Bertrand on the telly (brush up your French)

dev@day.com (Michael Marth) — 28 Oct 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Bertrand Delacretaz was interviewed at the OpenWorld Forum in Paris about the Apache Software Foundation. It is an ASF primer - apparently the ASF and its ways of working are relatively unknown in France.

Ignite Zurich

dev@day.com (Michael Marth) — 19 Oct 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Ignite in Zurich was a blast. Lots of good presentations (which I will hopefully be able to share later) and excellent discussions on content management. My favourite quote was from Newsweek's Meshach Jackson. Their editors on the CMS selection process:

If you don't select CQ we're all quitting.

I also enjoyed what David Nuescheler had to say about separation of content and layout. The standard CMS architecture thinking goes like this
a) we need to separate content and layout
b) therefore, the user interface for the authors cannot look anything like the rendered pages and we will make it look like a database entry mask

David demonstrated that a) simply does not lead to b). Or in his own words:

Separating content and layout does not mean you have to confuse the authors

To get a taste of the event: The conference hashtag was #dayignite and here are some Ignite pictures on Flickr:

So, in case you missed Ignite Zurich there is still Ignite Chicago coming up...

[ANN] Sling Users List now available

dev@day.com (Michael Marth) — 07 Oct 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Apache Sling keeps on growing up. Today's step: Felix Meschberger announced a users mailing list (before there was only one mailing list for developers and users). The new list is also available in the Discussion Groups section of dev.day.com.

If you use Sling please consider adding your project to the Sling users wiki page.

Re: RESTful daydream #4

dev@day.com (Michael Marth) — 07 Oct 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Justin Cormack has written a noteable blog post titled "RESTful daydream #4" (pun intended?) about RESTful content repositories. I disagree with some of what Justin writes about JCR and Sling. However, I completely share his vision about REST's role in content management and I am with him regarding the overall theme of his post.

Essentially, Justin asks for a "web content repository":

The odd thing is that a web content repository alone surely lends itself to a simple REST architecture. Content is after all lots of small resources with relations. [...] It takes content, relates it to other content, and serves it back, with authentication and versioning. Everything else is in other system layers, transforming it and so on. Not simple, but well defined; lower level than JCR + Sling say.

Apache Sling provides a RESTful interface onto content, but being a web application framework it provides much more, especially scripting. So I can understand well why Justin dismisses Sling as being too powerful. However, I believe that Jackrabbit's native http layer is pretty much on the mark (Justin also dismisses it in the comments as being not RESTful. I do not know why.). As far as I know the Jackrabbit http remoting layer is quite work-in-progress so one might argue about the details regarding its RESTfulness, but overall it fits what I understand to be a RESTful web content repository.

There is one aspect regarding a web content repository I would like to add to the discussion: I think it is crucial that the representations of resources and be consumed by browsers. HTML forms for writing and presenting resources in JSON should be part of the equation. Adding models or semantics on top of that ~~will~~ might do more harm than good.

Do we need a formal standard for web content repositories? From my perspective: not yet. At the moment we still need to learn more, i.e. more repository implementations and users that have built a CMS on top of a web content repository.

[LOTD] Why JCR is good for Content Management?

dev@day.com (Michael Marth) — 01 Oct 2009 00:00:01 GMT

eXo's Peter Nedonosko discusses on his blog why JCR is good for content management. I could not agree more with his conclusion: it is useful for cms developers.

JCR standard is useful for CMS [...]