Possible to create a custom interface, making use of files managed by Alfresco? - api

Our company's switching from traditional, lame Windows shared drive to a Linux install of Alfresco.
I'm the sole developer here (...go me!) and I would like to hear any thoughts on what I envisage being an interface, created by me, accessible by my team, and drawing on files stored in Alfresco, to modify some HTML files presented by the interface.
So, I would want to make use of file locking on HTML files loaded into my interface, and also the ability to save manipulated HTML files. Offering a version history via my interface would be a nicety, given that Alfresco itself can obviously be used to retrieve that data.
I saw WebDAV support, so I thought, "Hey! I could let my designers modify my pages, given team-decided boundaries!". It sure would beat Dreamweaver for this.
I should also probably mention that yes, we do have the ability to have our soon-to-be-installed Alfresco customised for my purposes, so if it is that this must happen, then any advice around that appreciated also.
Thanks for your thoughts, examples and the like.

The comment attached to this question is the answer I was after.

Related

Eclipse Generic File Templates

I've seen this question in various guises around the place, but as yet haven't found a suitable answer. If this is a duplicate, appologies (I'd be surprised if it wasn't a duplicate!)
Basically, I have a project which is using (mostly) shell code and sql. I want to make sure all the files have a similar setup, and that I document things consistently. To this end, I want to have template files / skeleton code within Eclipse.
It seems easy enough with Java, but not other file types. I have checked out ShellEd and it didn't appear to have this feature (correct me if I'm wrong).
It would be great to be able to add this as a new file type, such that I can say File -> New -> sh/sql and have the correct basic template with the right header etc.
Also, if possible I would like to be able to, one click, add a function prototype with the correct documentation to my files...
I thought this would be easy enough, but a few days of Googling and messing about, it seems I need to write a plugin of my own... but I can't beleive that it's not possible, more likely my Google skills aren't up to scratch...
any help?
cheers
Rob
P.S I'm normally a Vi (not Vim) user, but have had Eclipse forced upon me!
For SQL the Data Tools Platform Extender SDK (DTP) Eclipse project contains a SQL editor with templates (under Database Development in Install New Software).

Share a "deep link" from a Windows 8/WinRT application

I have searched using many different terms and phrases, and waded through many pages of results, but I have (remarkably) not seen anyone else addressing, even asking, about, this issue. So here goes...
Ultimate Goal: Allow a user viewing a content-based page (may contain both text and images) within a Windows Store app to share that content with someone else.
Description
I am working on taking a fair amount of content and making it available for browsing/navigating as a Windows 8/WinRT/Windows Store (we need a consistent name here) application. One of the desired features is to take advantage of the Share Charm, such that someone viewing a page could share that page with someone else.
The ideal behavior is for the application to implement the Share Source contract which would share an email message that contained some explanatory text, a link to get the app from the Windows Store, and a "deep link" into the shared page in the application.
Solutions Considered
We had originally looked at just generating a PDF representation of the page, but there are very few external libraries that would work under WinRT, and having to include externally licensed code would be problematic as well. Writing our own PDF generation code would out of scope.
We have also considered generating a Word document or PowerPoint slide using OpenXML, but again, we run up against the limitaions of WinRT. In this case, it is highly unlikely the OpenXML SDK is useable in a WinRT application.
Another thought was to pre-generate all of the pages as .pdf files, store them as resources, and when the Share Charm is invoked, share the .pdf file associated with the current page. The problem here is the application will have at least 150 content pages, and depending on how we break the content down, up to over 600. This would likely cause serious bloat.
Where We Are At
Thus we have come to sharing URIs. From what I can tell, though, the "deep linking" feature is only intended for use on Secondary Tiles tied to your application. Another avenue I considered was registering a protocol like, "my-special-app:" with the OS and having it fire up the application but that would require HKCR registry access, which is outside the WinRT sandbox.
If it matters, we are leaning towards an HTML/JS application, rather than XAML/C#, because the converted content will all be in HTML and the WebView control in WinRT is fairly limited. This decision is not yet final, though.
Conclusion
So, is this possible, and if so, how would it be done or where can I find documentation on it?
Thanks,
Dave Parker

Help me choose .net obfuscator program?

I have written a program in vb.net 2008 (using .net 3.5). It's a decent size program. One part of this program is to access an online database and encrypt/decrypt files. To access db I use a hardcoded password. To encrypt/decrypt files I used a hardcoded key. No matter what I do I would need to hardcode one of the two things at least. For example: even if I store database password in an encrypted file I would need to hardcode key to decrypt it. Or vice versa.
So after doing some thinking I figured that I need to obfuscate my code so that at least these hardcoded elements/values wont be visible easily. Infact to test, I used a program to disassemble my program. And to my amazement, it showed me every line of code in my program. I felt as if my entire code is pasted in my exe.
Thus I need to obfuscate my code. See I do not need too advanced settings. My program is not among the top shareware programs or super popular that I need very high security. But I need enough security so that my basic code, variables and sensitive information (password etc) is not visible.
Please help me choose a good obfuscator which will do the job. It should not be too tedious to use and should be sufficient for me. Plus it should be trusted and secure. I mean I don't want my application to crash or be unstable after I obfuscate it.
I have downloaded trial of .net reactor from Ezriz and it seems to be fine. What do you guys suggest? I cannot affort something over $200. So is this product worth going for. You guys know better.
Thank you for your support.
Cheers,
Saurabh
Obfuscation cannot solve this problem. An attacker can change his hosts file to redirect the domain name to a database he controls. When you login he will get the username/password.
Another attack would be to use a debugger like ollydbg to obtain the username/password in memory. The username/password must be in clear text prior to use, and an attacker will be able to find it.
Security Through Obscurity will never work. You will never be able to control the client.
A better approach is to setup a a SOAP (WCF) server to abstract your database operations. The logic for building the queries must be server side. Assume that an attacker has full access to any functions you expose via SOAP.
I use Eziriz .NET Reactor for a while now and it works great for me. I used Eazfuscator before but it wasn't really powerful.
.Net Reactor has awesome features such as Anti ILDASM and Native Exe file generation. Also it'll fit your budget. You can use Trial before purchasing it and test if it works with your scenario.
You should strongly consider Babel .net obfuscator. In my opinion even though it is a console application it is by far the best for price, licensing (not locked to a single computer) and features.
I use Eazfuscator:http://www.foss.kharkov.ua/g1/projects/eazfuscator/dotnet/Default.aspx
It powerful and it's free. Wonderful tool extremely simple to use.

Software/Platform to Share Specs

What are the software/ Wiki you use to write and share your specs about the developers, testers and management?
Do you use Wiki system, and if so, what Wiki software you use?
Or do you use Sharepoint to manage and version the specs? One problem with SharePoint 2003 as specs platform is that it's very hard to collaborate among different people.
For backward compatibility sake, I would also like to have the platform able to import Microsoft Word seamlessly. And it would certainly help if the interface is similar to Microsoft Word.
Any idea?
I've used Confluence at a number of places, it's a pretty powerful wiki and very good for creating specifications that can be shared amongst various parties. See:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/
There's some more information here on the advantages of using Confluence:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/170352/confluence-experiences
EDIT: I've updated this to deal with the Microsoft Word import feature you mentioned. Confluence supports this through the Office Connector here:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/office-connector.jsp
There's also a Sharepoint connector:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/sharepoint-connector.jsp
plus a whole bunch of plugins:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/sharepoint-connector.jsp
Some of these are user contributed also. I can't recommend Confluence enough as a commercial wiki.
I've also used JSPWiki, which is open source. it's ok but not as good as confluence, see:
http://www.jspwiki.org/
You could try Google docs - I have successfully used this in the past. It supports import / export to MS Word, and it has great support for multiple user - see http://www.brighthub.com/internet/google/articles/8236.aspx.
It supports versioning, allows you to chat with other people who are currently working on the document, and shows you a list of all the changes others have made to the document (without needing to close / reopen the document).
If you want corporate support, Google also provides that - see Google Apps for business.
We use SharePoint -- it's not ideal, but it does a decent job. If I were you, I would seriously look at getting off SharePoint 2003 and on to MOSS (SharePoint 2007). It's not perfect, but it's substantially better. Here's a little bit on using MOSS as a wiki. I think in general wiki's are a good tool for getting people up to speed on your system. We used to pass around "getting started documents" and now we have all that type of stuff in our developer portal.
Per John's comment, I looked up this feature comparison. I have to go back and look at what features I'm using that are not in WSS -- I might be paying for licenses I don't need! :)
We use email. I know it isn't elaborate, but it is easy to use. Everyone has it installed and there are no licensing issues. All spec changes are sent to an super set email distro indicating the updates and the location on the network share where the spec can be found.
We use Alfresco, in its Community version, from both its Share and Explorer web interfaces.
Quite useful, with a document library, wiki, forum and calendar.
We curently host about 1.8 Go consisting mainly in docs, versionned and sometimes automatically converted to PDF (by creating an automatic content rule).
FTP, WebDav and network share are also used to access to the same repository.
You could take a look at Microsoft Groove - the collaboration software that Microsoft bought a few years back.
It's bundled free with premium versions of Microsoft Office.
You can customize the workspace with discussion boards and can fairly seamlessly store collaboratively-edited Office documents.
We use MediaWiki for dos & specs. Wiki definitely wins anything like Microsoft Word or SharePoint - it allows you to develop a documentation in "first refer, then describe" = "divide and rule" way. Perfect for developers - they used to think the same way. The process of developing a documentation is almost ideal: you start from TOC and drill down until you write the document for every link you put earlier.
MediaWiki is quite customizable - there are lots of extensions there. The most necessary ones are:
Source code highlighter - CSO_Source
Our own templates integrating wiki with class reference.
Others are InterWiki, FileProtocolLinks, YouTube (we use customized version of it to display HD video), ReCaptcha, SpecialDeleteOldRevisions, Maintenance.
Some integration examples are here.
And we use Google issue tracker to track the issues. Its main advantages:
Imput usability: the process of adding\changing the issue is really convenient there. Earlier we tried Track Studio - the same actions require 2-3 times more time there, so it died fast simply because most of us hated to use it.
Customizable grids. See the examples. Really helpful.
Atom\RSS support. So everyone knows what's going on.
There is a Gurtle tool integrating it with TortoiseSVN. Really helpful.
Its main disadvantage is that it can't be closed from the public access. This makes it simply unusable in many cases.
If you want a UI similar to Word, why not use Word with SharePoint 2007? You're on 2003 so the experience is there. Upgrade to SharePoint 2007 and you can have the collaboration, Word features, document sharing, and so on.
This is the kind of thing Microsoft wants people to use Office for, so there's a ton of doco out there about how to configure your SharePoint and Office environment to support collaboration.
There is something that Google do in this direction and it looks really cool: wave.google.com. It would be a great step in collaboration and worth to wait it.
Here we use Google Docs it makes the documents available to everyone write or read only, public or private among people that have or not Google accounts, it also can import Word docs, not to mention that it runs directly into the browser so it has high availability with zero cost and zero setup, also its computer/OS agnostic, we have a nice experience with it.
Also perhaps you should take a look at Basecamp or Backpack at 37Signals, any of then might also fit your bill.
We use DocBook for all of our specifications (and other customer-facing documentation). DocBook is an XML format that lets you easily generate documents in just about any format, including PDF, which is how we distribute things to clients to get them signed off. We can divide a document into files (by section) and commit everything to our source control system (Subversion). Because it is all XML (i.e. text-based), Subversion's automatic merging and conflict resolution works great if two people work on the same file. We have a set of stylesheets that all of our documents use, so all documents share the exact same style/format, with no extra work on our part.
And if you don't like editing XML files directly, there are GUI front-ends that provide a reasonably WYSIWYG-like experience. I believe that most people in my office use XMLMind. Still, we happen to all be technical people so if we had to write XML directly it wouldn't be an issue.
As a sidenote, we also put out release notes. We have some XSLT that lets us write documents like this:
<bugs>
<bug id="1234" component="web">JavaScript error when clicking the Kick Me button</bug>
</bugs>
We then have a script that runs through our Subversion repository doing an svn log from the previous release tag to the current release tag, and some Bugzilla integration to automatically generate release notes on-the-fly.
(also, for most internal-only documentation, we use MediaWiki, which is also a great way to collaborate.)
We use OnTime. It was originally only used for defect tracking, but we've started using it to track features as well. These can be used to document the feature as it evolves during development. Features can be grouped together into sprints or releases, and time can be tracked against each feature. If you are using SCRUM, you can also plot burn-down charts for each sprint. It also has wiki functionality.

Beginning XUL & XPCOM development with XULRunner?

I am planning to design an application XUL & XPCOM for proprietary system. So i have decided to use C/C++ but how can I start the development as a beginner in this field
I cannot find a good guide to start around. It will be good if you can give some links
and books. I also would like to know how to prevent the user from modifying the code specially in the view part because the logic can be done in XPCOM.
XUL explorer is a tool that lets you drag and drop XUL. It's good for mocking up an interface or starting to learn about the various elements you can use.
xulrunner is Mozilla's binary that allows you to run XUL/XPCOM/javascript applications.
The Mozilla Developer Center is your friend.
If you use IRC, check out #xulrunner on irc.mozilla.org . They are fairly tolerant of some questions from beginners.
I don't think there's going to be away around allowing the user to see (or potentially modify) the actually XUL interface. There are some paths for trying to secure JavaScript in some way (some surface level, like obscuring, minifying, but then some possible secure loading methods). XPCOM can be written in C++ or JavaScript, to name a few, if you put more of your code in XPCOM it should be more secure, I think.
A fun start for seeing what you can do in XUL is to check out the XUL Periodic Table.
Preventing the user from modifying your code is futile, as they will always be able to do this.
You could of course ship a modified build of xulrunner (containing some required XPCOM as well) which only loads jars signed by some key, but they could trivially hack around that by modifying the binary or the image in memory.
So don't bother trying to stop people modifying your code - you can't - unless you're on a trusted platform such as a games console - and even then it's not guaranteed.
This helped me to create my first XPCOM.