Permeance Technologies

How to make navigation bars and breadcrumbs accessible

2010-09-07T01:14:24Z

Navigation bars and breadcrumbs are simply a collection of links. To make these accessible, wrap them in a <map>. Normally, a <map> is used for image maps but this is what is recommended by technique H50 of WCAG 2.0. I tested this with SortSite and our breadcrumbs now pass the accessibility tests.

Example:

 <map title="Breadcrumbs"> <a href="/">Home</a> &gt; <a href="/foo">Foo</a> &gt; <a href="/bar">Bar</a> ... </map>

In this example, the <map> does not affect the rendering of the breadcrumbs.

How to debug Liferay email

2010-08-20T09:19:59Z

To turn on logging of Liferay mail and JavaMail, add the following to your Log4j configuration in webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/class/META-INF/portal-log4j-ext.xml after the last <appender> entry:

 <logger name="com.liferay.util.mail"> <level value="DEBUG"/> </logger>

For setting up SMTP using gmail, add the following to webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes/portal-ext.properties:

 mail.session.mail.smtp.socketFactory.class=javax.net.ssl.SSLSocketFactory mail.session.mail.smtp.host=smtp.gmail.com mail.session.mail.smtp.port=465 mail.session.mail.smtp.auth=true mail.session.mail.smtp.user=<your gmail email address> mail.session.mail.smtp.password=<your password>

Using common unit test classes between Maven modules

2010-07-28T03:21:31Z

Here's one that I'd not had to do before.

Suppose that I have module A that has an abstract TestCase class in src/test/java and in module B (that depends on module A) I want create some test cases that extend from the abstract TestCase in module A.

The TestCase class does not appear in the JAR for module A obviously so the regular dependency does not work. And moving the TestCase into src/main/java is not right as I don't want any testing framework JARs in my final build.

So....

In the pom for module A

 <plugin> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-jar-plugin</artifactId> <executions> <execution> <goals> <goal>test-jar</goal> </goals> </execution> </executions> </plugin>

Now when installing module A two JARs are install, A-version.jar and A-version-tests.jar

Now in module B I can add a dependency on the tests from module A

 <dependency> <groupId>my.group.id</groupId> <artifactId>A</artifactId> <version>v</version> <scope>test</scope> <classifier>tests</classifier> </dependency>

And that's it. In my src/test/java for module B I can create unit tests that extend from the TestCase class in module A.

Spring 3 - New MVC Features

2010-06-17T17:22:16Z

Spring 3 has been out for a little while now but I only recently sat down and looked through the new features.

One that stands out is the @PathVariable annotation.

Using the annotation driven controllers of Spring 2.5 you can map controllers like this

 @RequestMapping("/bank/myaccounts")
public class AccountController {
    @RequestMapping("/details")
    public ModelAndView showAccountDetails(@RequestParam("accName") String accountName) {
        ...
    }
}

So the url http://server/application/bank/myaccounts/details?accName=AccountName will be handled by the showAccountDetails method with AccountName as the parameter

With Spring 3.0 you can map a controller like this

 @RequestMapping("/bank/myaccounts")
public class AccountController {
    @RequestMapping("/details/{accName}")
    public ModelAndView showAccountDetails(@PathVariable("accName") String accountName) {
        ...
    }
}

And I can access the url http://server/application/bank/myaccounts/details/AccountName with AccountName still being the parameter to the method.

Cool stuff.

The @PathVariable can handle many data types including dates

 @RequestMapping("/somepath/{date}") public ModelAndView someMethod(@PathVariable @DateTimeFormat(format = "yyyyMMdd") java.util.Date date) { .... }

so my URL of http://...../somepath/20100504 would give me a java.util.Date of the 4th of May 2010 as a parameter to my method.

http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/javadoc-api/org/springframework/web/bind/annotation/PathVariable.html

Internet access on the move

2010-05-11T16:28:38Z

Here is my speed test sitting a SouthWest Coach Lines bus. Not bad!

They've just put a Telstra NextG wireless modem in a cupboard at the back of the bus. No external antenna or anything.

They also have a USB charging plug for every seat but it does nothing for my iPhone.

Liferay Training - Australia

2010-07-27T01:47:29Z

After identifying a growing need in our region for Liferay training, Permeance Technologies secured the first official Australian Liferay Training Partnership in early 2010.

Our experienced training team delivered the first training sessions in April. Tailored on-site training events have taken place in Adelaide and Canberra, with clients who have both Community and Enterprise Editions.

Liferay training is the fastest way to learn best practice in how to successfully deploy Liferay Portal. We offer all standard Liferay Training Topics (Portal Administrator, Developer and System Administrator), or a combination approach. We are more than happy to negotiate a best-fit, tailored event for your team.

To accommodate existing need and potential Liferay users and licensees, the Australian training dates are set on both the east and west coast for the 5-day Portal Administrator/Developer course:

Sydney: Oct 11-15

Enrol now. Early bird discounts do apply.

*If you would like more information about enrolling in an online Portal Administrator course, contact our training team.

Penny Curtis is the Training Delivery Manager.

If you would like to discover more about Liferay Training and how it can support the needs of your organisation, email: training@permeance.com.au OR call +61 8 6262 5432.

Liferay and Education

2010-03-30T00:31:05Z

Liferay and Education, a great fit.

Many Education departments and institutions across Australia are leveraging the strengths of Liferay. There are many reasons for this, but one is the extensive out-of-the-box collaboration suite Liferay offers. Basically Liferay is a perfect fit for education, students and teachers who need to be able to collaborate. This education focus on Liferay is set to deliver great benefits to all users, and the openness of the solution ensures there will be opportunities to leverage development costs and experiences.

Whilst private enterprise wrestles with: Are collaboration tools counterproductive? The education sector are rolling up their sleeves and tucking in.

There is no question Liferay has bought enterprise open source software (OSS) into the fray, alongside the proprietary enterprise heavy weights. Gartner offers their independent view, calling it visionary. And with that Liferay has found a great home in Education, across the globe and especially here in Australia.

Shayne Tanner is the General Manager of our Victorian office.

If you would like to discover more about Liferay and how it can help your organisation, email or call.

info@permeance.com.au OR (03) 9412 7628

Ref: Liferay & Education

Java Decompiler

2010-02-02T17:45:53Z

I recently lost some Java source code but still had the class files as built by Eclipse. So the hunt was on for a decompiler to recover my source.

JAD http://www.varaneckas.com/jad probably works but not with class file version 50 as my classes were.

JD-GUI http://java.decompiler.free.fr however is fantastic. There is even a plugin for Eclipse to show contents of class files you don't have the source for.

Given up on Firefox on Fedora

2010-01-26T23:33:30Z

It just doesn't work. Chrome is a million times happier.

Most importantly Flash doesn't randomly die anymore so the IBM SlamTracker for the Australian Open will keep going all day now.

Budding iPhone Devs

2010-01-13T23:55:37Z

Winter 2010 Stanford iPhone Application Development Course Now on iTunes U http://bit.ly/81T3I3

How to check the version of Ubuntu

2010-01-04T00:53:44Z

Nice and simple.

In a terminal window type:

 lsb_release -a

Upgrading from ext3 to ext4

2009-12-17T08:06:38Z

Taken from https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ext4_in_Fedora_11#How_do_I_migrate_from_Ext3_to_Ext4.3F

If you want to convert a partition to Ext4 post-installation, you can use the following manual process. Do backup your data for safety.

umount /dev/sdb2 (where sdb2 is the ext3 partition you are about to convert to ext4)
tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/sdb2 (converting into Ext4)
fsck -pf /dev/sdb2 (filesystem check for additional safety)
mount -t ext4 /dev/sdb2 /media (to verify conversion)

Seems to have worked....

Two CMIS projects at Apache?

2009-12-12T13:33:55Z

A second CMIS project has been proposed as an incubator project at Apache:

[PROPOSAL] OpenCMIS incubator for Content Mangement Interoperability Services (CMIS)

This has raised a lot of interest within the existing Chemistry project (as shown in the subsequent discussion above) since they are also an incubator project for CMIS!

Chemistry:

"Apache Chemistry is an effort to provide a Java (and possibly others, like JavaScript) implementation of the upcoming CMIS specification , consisting of a high-level API for developers wanting to manipulate documents, a low-level SPI close to the CMIS protocol for developers wanting to implement a client or a server, and default implementations for all of the above. Chemistry aims to cover both the AtomPub and SOAP bindings defined by the CMIS specifications."

OpenCMIS:

"OpenCMIS provides a Java implementation of the OASIS CMIS specification. This includes a library to connect as a consumer to a CMIS repository, and a library to provide the CMIS protocol handlers on top of an existing repository. All the protocol bindings defined by the CMIS specification will be supported...

As the APIs are pretty different right now, contributing the OpenCMIS code to Chemistry will be very hard to do - but on a mid-term perspective, we will review our options to merge OpenCMIS with Chemistry..."

How to install the Java Plugin on Firefox with Fedora 12 x86_64

2009-12-11T02:40:02Z

After much frustration, I finally stumbled on the correct answer about installing Java Plugin on x86_64 on Linux: plugindoc.mozdev.org/linux-amd64.html#java-sun. This shows that the correct library to link is called libnpjp2.so. I had tried libjavaplugin_jni.so which seemed to be the closest match to libjavaplugin_oji.so which everyone else spoke about. So, in short:

 ln -s /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_16/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/libnpjp2.so

Entering about:plugins in the address bar shows it is registered:

Open source isn't perfect but it's pretty good

2009-12-08T02:19:23Z

I've recently been working with Eclipse BPEL and Apache ODE and fairly quickly found bugs with both. These bugs were easy enough to fix if you have the inclinition to debug them. In all cases, I was impressed that after contributing the patch to the respective bug tracking tools, it wasn't long before they were tested, reviewed and committed!

Eclipse BPEL

Bug 296532 - NPE when process folder contains files without a file extension = 7 days
Bug 296538 - Publish to the server does not preserve sub-directories = 7 days

Apache ODE

ODE-725 - Patch to add support for postgres to dao-jpa-db = <1 day
ODE-731 - ODE console doesn't work in IE6 = <1 day
ODE-732 - Patch for java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException = <1 day

So if you find a bug in an open source product, please fix it and commit a patch!

How to secure Apache ODE using Liferay users and groups

2009-12-04T08:07:30Z

Rather than using a separate database (or file) of users and roles, we decided to re-use the security features of Liferay Portal. This follows on from How to secure Apache ODE which you should read first.

Note: The following steps were performed with Apache ODE 2.1 snapshot (trunk), Apache Tomcat 6.0.18, Liferay Portal CE 5.2.3 and PostgreSQL 8.4. They should work with some modifications for other configurations.

Firstly, we need two database views that comply with Tomcat's DataSourceRealm:

 CREATE USER tomcat PASSWORD 'tomcat'; CREATE SCHEMA tomcat AUTHORIZATION tomcat; GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA lportal TO tomcat; GRANT REFERENCES ON TABLE lportal.user_, lportal.users_usergroups, lportal.usergroup TO tomcat; GRANT SELECT ON TABLE lportal.user_, lportal.users_usergroups, lportal.usergroup TO tomcat; CREATE VIEW tomcat.users AS SELECT screenname as user_name, password_ as user_pass FROM lportal.user_; CREATE VIEW tomcat.user_roles AS SELECT u.screenname AS user_name, ug.name AS role_name FROM lportal.user_ u, lportal.users_usergroups uug, lportal.usergroup ug WHERE u.userid = uug.userid AND uug.usergroupid = ug.usergroupid; ALTER TABLE tomcat.users OWNER TO tomcat; ALTER TABLE tomcat.user_roles OWNER TO tomcat;

In this example for PostgreSQL, the Liferay tables are stored in the lportal schema and the new tomcat views are created in the tomcat schema. A user called tomcat is created to own these views.

Next, we add the DataSourceRealm to $TOMCAT/conf/server.xml, inside the <GlobalNamingResources> area:

 <Resource         name="jdbc/tomcat"         auth="Container"         type="javax.sql.DataSource"         maxActive="10"         maxIdle="3"         maxWait="10000"         username="tomcat"         password="tomcat"         driverClassName="org.postgresql.Driver"         url="jdbc:postgresql://localhost/ncp" />

Finally, we declare the Realm inside the <Context>, providing the names of the tables and columns:

 <Realm         className="org.apache.catalina.realm.DataSourceRealm"         debug="99"         dataSourceName="jdbc/tomcat"         roleNameCol="role_name"         userCredCol="user_pass"         userNameCol="user_name"         userRoleTable="tomcat.user_roles"         userTable="tomcat.users" />

In Liferay Portal, create a User Group called "ode-admin" and assign your users to this group.
Next, restart Tomcat.
Open the ODE console using http://localhost:8080/ode/.
When prompted, enter the username and password of a Liferay user in the ode-admin user group.

How to secure Apache ODE

2009-12-04T05:15:20Z

Apache ODE does not have any security when installed out-of-the-box. It is simple to use Tomcat security to protect the ODE admin console.

Add a user and role to $TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml:

 <role rolename="ode-admin"/> <user username="admin" password="xxxxxxxx" roles="ode-admin"/>

Declare the security constraints in ode/WEB-INF/web.xml:

 <web-app> ... <security-role>     <role-name>ode-admin</role-name> </security-role> <security-constraint> <display-name>Security constraint for the ODE admin console</display-name>     <web-resource-collection>     <url-pattern>*.html</url-pattern>     <url-pattern>/processes/InstanceManagement</url-pattern>     <url-pattern>/processes/ProcessManagement</url-pattern>     <url-pattern>/processes/DeploymentService</url-pattern>     <url-pattern>/deployment/*</url-pattern>     <http-method>GET</http-method>     <http-method>POST</http-method> </web-resource-collection> <auth-constraint>     <role-name>ode-admin</role-name> </auth-constraint> <user-data-constraint>     <transport-guarantee>NONE</transport-guarantee> </user-data-constraint> </security-constraint> <login-config>    <auth-method>BASIC</auth-method> </login-config> </web-app>

Restart Tomcat.
Now, when interacting with the ODE console at http://localhost:8080/ode/, it will prompt for a username and password.

If you tail the access log, you can confirm that the SOAP admin calls are also protected. The processes themselves are not protected because we'll use WS-Security. In the following example, the remote user is "admin" if protected or "-" if not protected (see third column):

 [terry@localhost logs]$ tail -f localhost_access_log.2009-12-04.txt 127.0.0.1 - admin [04/Dec/2009:13:00:22 +0800] "POST /ode/processes/InstanceManagement HTTP/1.1" 200 731 127.0.0.1 - admin [04/Dec/2009:13:00:22 +0800] "POST /ode/processes/InstanceManagement HTTP/1.1" 200 731 127.0.0.1 - admin [04/Dec/2009:13:00:37 +0800] "POST /ode/processes/InstanceManagement HTTP/1.1" 200 731 127.0.0.1 - admin [04/Dec/2009:13:00:37 +0800] "POST /ode/processes/InstanceManagement HTTP/1.1" 200 731 127.0.0.1 - admin [04/Dec/2009:13:00:52 +0800] "POST /ode/processes/InstanceManagement HTTP/1.1" 200 731 ... 127.0.0.1 - - [04/Dec/2009:13:13:23 +0800] "POST /ode/processes/HelloWorld HTTP/1.1" 200 255 - ...

Upgrading to Fedora 12

2009-11-23T01:22:38Z

I upgraded my workstation to Fedora 12 on Friday. Bit of an effort, following the instructions at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq the command

 yum groupupdate Base

Failed with an error about not being able to find the Base group. So I was stuck half way between 12 and 11. Only solution was to change my yum repos to directly point at 12 and run yum update. There were a few conflicts that meant uninstalling the vnc server before libc could be installed but once that was sorted, everything downloaded and installed no problem.

I noticed that trying to run the install from using preupgrade might not work as on reboot it tries to access the internet to download some packages, if you're running cntlm or similar then that might not start before the installer kicks in!

How to run the unit tests of Liferay Portal 5.2.3 CE

2009-11-21T06:38:56Z

Running the unit tests for Liferay Portal with Linux is straight-forward once you know how.

Set up the environment

Install Ant 1.7+
Install MySQL 5.1+
Install Java 6.0+

Set environment variables:

 export JAVA_OPTS=-Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m export COMPUTERNAME=$HOSTNAME

Create the directory structure

The following commands:

 cd ~ mkdir liferay wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/lportal/Liferay%20Portal/\ 5.2.3/liferay-portal-src-5.2.3.zip?use_mirror=transact unzip liferay-portal-src-5.2.3.zip mv liferay-portal-src-5.2.3 portal

will create the directory structure:

 liferay/ portal/

Set up the MySQL database for testing

Install/start MySQL 5.x (in my case, 5.1.39)

mysql -u root and run:

 create database lportal character set utf8; grant all on lportal.* to ''@'localhost';

(so username/password not required)

Create a legacy ZIP (not sure what this was intended for but it is needed):

 cd ~/liferay/portal/sql mkdir legacy zip -r legacy.zip legacy cd .. echo "sql.legacy.zip=sql/legacy.zip" > test.$COMPUTERNAME.properties

Note: test.<username>.properties gets overridden each run!

If using Linux, create sql/test.$COMPUTERNAME.properties as follows:

 minimal.suffix= mysql.executable=/usr/bin/mysql mysql.arg.line=-u root -e "source create${minimal.suffix}/create${minimal.suffix}-mysql.sql"

If not using subversion and Windoze, edit build-test.xml and comment out all <exec> of cmd.exe to stop it attempting to revert files using subversion.

Run the unit tests

cd ~/liferay/portal
ant test

Review output for errors, for example:
(there does not appear to be any simple way to create an HTML report)

 [terry@localhost portal]$ find . -name test-results -exec grep -r errors {} \; | cut -d" " -f2,3,5,6 errors="0" failures="0" name="com.liferay.portal.kernel.messaging.jmx.MessageBusManagerTest" tests="1" errors="0" failures="0" name="com.liferay.portal.kernel.util.ValidatorTest" tests="1" errors="0" failures="0" name="com.liferay.portal.kernel.messaging.jmx.DestinationManagerTest" tests="1" errors="0" failures="0" name="com.liferay.portal.kernel.util.RecurrenceMonthlyTest" tests="26" errors="0" failures="0" name="com.liferay.portal.kernel.messaging.IteratorDispatcherDestinationTest" tests="1" errors="0" failures="0" name="com.liferay.portal.kernel.messaging.ArrayDispatcherDestinationTest" tests="1" errors="0" failures="0" name="com.liferay.portal.kernel.util.RecurrenceDailyTest" tests="26" errors="0" failures="0" name="com.liferay.portal.kernel.util.RecurrenceWeeklyTest" tests="26" errors="0" failures="0" name="com.liferay.portal.kernel.util.RecurrenceYearlyTest" tests="26" errors="0" failures="0" name="com.liferay.portal.kernel.messaging.jmx.DestinationStatisticsManagerTest" tests="1" errors="0" failures="0" name="com.liferay.portal.kernel.util.UnicodePropertiesTest" tests="2" errors="0" failures="0" name="com.liferay.portal.kernel.util.StringUtilTest" tests="3" errors="0" failures="0" name="com.liferay.util.VersionTest" tests="5" errors="0" failures="0" name="com.liferay.portal.service.ServiceTestSuite" tests="24" errors="0" failures="0" name="com.liferay.portal.util.MiscTestSuite" tests="5" errors="0" failures="0" name="com.liferay.portal.service.persistence.PersistenceTestSuite" tests="880"

How to run Enterprise Architect on 64-bit Fedora 12 Linux using Crossover

2009-11-18T11:20:36Z

The following steps will enable you to run Enterprise Architect (and other 32-bit Windows applications) inside 64-bit Fedora 12 Linux.

Firstly, we need to install 32-bit versions of many libraries:

yum install libXi.i686
yum install libz.i686
yum install zlib.i686
yum install libgcc.i686
yum install cups-libs.i686
yum install alsa-lib.i686
yum install openssl.i686
yum install libgphoto2.i686
yum install hal-libs.i686
yum install qt-mt.i686
yum install qt3.i686
yum install sane-backends-libs.i686

Next, we can install Crossover 8:

rpm -ivh crossover-standard-demo-8.0.0-1.i386.rpm

Finally, the EA Install Process via Crossover should now work as documented...