How-To Tutorials

  Sakai CLE Courseware Management: The Official Guide The benefits of knowing that frameworks exist Sakai is built on top of numerous third-party open source libraries and frameworks. Why write code for converting from XML text files to Java objects or connecting and managing databases, when others have specialized and thought out the technical problems and found appropriate and consistent solutions? This reuse of code saves effort and decreases the complexity of creating new functionality. Using third-party frameworks has other benefits as well; you can choose the best from a series of external libraries, increasing the quality of your own product. The external frameworks have their own communities who test them actively. Outsourcing generic requirements, such as the rudiments of generating indexes for searching, allows the Sakai community to concentrate on higher-level goals, such as building new tools. For developers, also for course instructors and system administrators, it is useful background to know, roughly, what the underlying frameworks do: For a developer, it makes sense to look at reuse first. Why re-invent the wheel? Why write with external framework X for manipulating XML files when other developers have already extensively tried and tested and are running framework Y? Knowing what others have done saves time. This knowledge is especially handy for the new-to-Sakai developers who could be tempted to write from scratch. For the system administrator, each framework has its own strengths, weaknesses, and terminology. Understanding the terminology and technologies gives you a head start in debugging glitches and communicating with the developers. For a manager, knowing that Sakai has chosen solid and well-respected open source libraries should help influence buying decisions in favor of this platform. For the course instructor, knowing which frameworks exist and what their potential is helps inform the debate about adding interesting new features. Knowing what Sakai uses and what is possible sharpens the instructors' focus and the ability to define realistic requirements. For the software engineering student, Sakai represents a collection of best practices and frameworks that will make the students more saleable in the labor market. Using the third-party frameworks This section details frameworks that Sakai is heavily dependent on: Spring (http://www.springsource.org/), Hibernate ((http://www.hibernate.org/), and numerous Apache projects (http://www.apache.org/). Generally, Java application builders understand these frameworks. This makes it relatively easier to hire programmers with experience. All projects are open source and the individual use does not clash with Sakai's open source license (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ecl2.php). The benefit of using Spring Spring is a tightly architected set of frameworks designed to support the main goals of building modern business applications. Spring has a broad set of abilities, from connecting to databases, to transaction, managing business logic, validation, security, and remote access. It fully supports the most modern architectural design patterns. The framework takes away a lot of drudgery for a programmer and enables pieces of code to be plugged in or to be removed by editing XML configuration files rather than refactoring the raw code base itself. You can see for yourself; this is the best framework for the user provider within Sakai. When you log in, you may want to validate the user credentials using a piece of code that connects to a directory service such as LDAP , or replace the code with another piece of code that gets credentials from an external database or even reads from a text file. Thanks to Sakai's services that rely on Spring! You can give (called injecting) the wanted code to a Service manager, which then calls the code when needed. In Sakai terminology, within a running application a service manager manages services for a particular type of data. For example, a course service manager allows programmers to add, modify, or delete courses. A user service manager does the same for users. Spring is responsible for deciding which pieces of code it injects into which service manager, and developers do not need to program the heavy lifting, only the configuration. The advantage is that later, as a part of adapting Sakai to a specific organization, system administrators can also reconfigure authentication or many other services to tailor to local preferences without recompilation. Spring abstracts away underlying differences between different databases. This allows you to program once, each for MySQL , Oracle , and so on, without taking into account the databases' differences. Spring can sit on the top of Hibernate and other limited frameworks, such as JDBC (yet another standard for connecting to databases). This adaptability gives architects more freedom to change and refactor (the process of changing the structure of the code to improve it) without affecting other parts of the code. As Sakai grows in code size, Spring and good architectural design patterns diminish the chance breaking older code. To sum up, the Spring framework makes programming more efficient. Sakai relies on the main framework. Many tasks that programmers would have previously hard coded are now delegated to XML configuration files. Hibernate for database coupling Hibernate is all about coupling databases to the code. Hibernate is a powerful, high performance object/relational persistence and query service. That is to say, a designer describes Java objects in a specific structure within XML files. After reading these files, Hibernate gains the ability to save or load instances of the object from the database. Hibernate supports complex data structures, such as Java collections and arrays of objects. Again, it is a choice of an external framework that does the programmer's dog work, mostly via XML configuration. The many Apache frameworks Sakai is biased rightfully towards projects associated with the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) (http://www.apache.org/). Sakai instances run within a Tomcat server and many institutes place an Apache web server in front of the Tomcat server to deal with dishing out static content (content that does not change, such as an ordinary web page), SSL/TLS, ease of configuration, and log parsing. Further, individual internal and external frameworks make use of the Apache commons frameworks, (http://commons.apache.org/) which have reusable libraries for all kinds of specific needs, such as validation, encoding, e-mailing, uploading files, and so on. Even if a developer does not use the common libraries directly, they are often called by other frameworks and have significant impact on the wellbeing; for example, security of a Sakai instance. To ensure look and feel consistency, designers used common technologies, such as Apache Velocity, Apache Wicket , Apache MyFaces (an implementation of Java Server Faces), Reasonable Server Faces (RSF) , and plain old Java Server Pages (JSP) Apache Velocity places much of the look and feel in text templates that non-programmers can then manipulate with text editors. The use of Velocity is mostly superseded by JSF. However, as Sakai moves forward, technologies such as RSF and Wicket (http://wicket.apache.org/) are playing a predominate role. Sakai uses XML as the format of choice to support much of its functionality, from configuration files, to the backing up of sites and the storage of internal data representations, RSS feeds, and so on. There is a lot of runtime effort in converting to and from XML and translating XML into other formats. Here are the gory technical details: there are two main methods for parsing XML: You can parse (another word for process) XML into a Document Object Model (DOM) in the memory that you can later transverse and manipulate programmatically. XML can also be parsed via an event-driven mechanism where Java methods are called, for example, when an XML tag begins or ends, or there is a body to the tag. Programmatically simple API for XML (SAX) libraries support the second approach in Java. Generally, it is easier to program with DOM than SAX, but as you need a model of the XML in memory, DOM, by its nature, is more memory intensive. Why would that matter? In large-scale deployments, the amount of memory tends to limit a Sakai instance's performance rather than Sakai being limited by the computational power of the servers. Therefore, as Sakai heavily uses XML, whenever possible, a developer should consider using SAX and avoid keeping the whole model of the XML document in memory. Looking at dependencies As Sakai adapts and expands its feature set, expect the range of external libraries to expand. The table mentions libraries used, their links to the relevant home page, and a very brief description of their functionality. Name Homepage Description Apache-Axis http://ws.apache.org/axis/ SOAP web services Apache-Axis2 http://ws.apache.org/axis2   SOAP, REST web services. A total rewrite of Apache-axis. However, not currently used within Entity Broker, a Sakai specific component.   Apache Commons http://commons.apache.org Lower-level utilities Batik http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/ Batik is a Java-based toolkit for applications or applets that want to use images in the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format. Commons-beanutils http://commons.apache.org/beanutils/ Methods for Java bean manipulation Commons-codec http://commons.apache.org/codec Commons Codec provides implementations of common encoders and decoders, such as Base64, Hex, Phonetic, and URLs. Commons-digester http://commons.apache.org/digester Common methods for initializing objects from XML configuration Commons-httpclient http://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client Supports HTTP-based standards with the client side in mind Commons-logging http://commons.apache.org/logging/ Logging support Commons-validator http://commons.apache.org/validator Support for verifying the integrity of received data Excalibur http://excalibur.apache.org Utilities FOP http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop Print formatting ready for conversions to PDF and a number of other formats Hibernate http://www.hibernate.org ORM database framework Log4j http://logging.apache.org/log4j For logging Jackrabbit http://jackrabbit. apache.org http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=170 Content repository. A content repository is a hierarchical content store with support for structured and unstructured content, full text search, versioning, transactions, observation, and more. James http://james.apache.org A mail server Java Server Faces http://java.sun.com/javaee/javaserverfaces Simplifies building user interfaces for JavaServer applications Lucene http://lucene.apache.org Indexing MyFaces http://myfaces.apache.org JSF implementation with implementation-specific widgets Pluto http://portals.apache.org/pluto The Reference Implementation of the Java Portlet Specfication Quartz http://www.opensymphony.com/quartz Scheduling Reasonable Server Faces (RSF) http://www2.caret.cam.ac.uk/rsfwiki RSF is built on the Spring framework, and simplifies the building of views via XHTML. ROME https://rome.dev.java.net ROME is a set of open source Java tools for parsing, generating, and publishing RSS and Atom feeds. SAX http://www.saxproject.org Event-based XML parser STRUTS http://struts.apache.org/ Heavy-weight MVC framework, not used in the core of Sakai, but rather some components used as part of the occasional tool Spring http://www.springsource.org Used extensively within the code base of Sakai. It is a broad framework that is designed to make building business applications simpler. Tomcat http://tomcat.apache.org Servlet container Velocity http://velocity.apache.org Templating Wicket http://wicket.apache.org Web app development framework Xalan http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j An XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) processor for transforming XML documents into HTML, text, or other XML document types xerces http://xerces.apache.org/xerces-j XML parser For the reader who has downloaded and built Sakai from source code, you can automatically generate a list of current external dependencies via Maven. First, you will need to build the binary version and then print out the dependency report. To achieve this from within the top-level directory of the source code, you can run the following commands: mvn -Ppack-demo install mvn dependency:list The table is based on an abbreviated version of the dependency list, generated from the source code from March 2009. For those of you wishing to dive into the depths of Sakai, you can search the home pages mentioned in the table. In summary, Spring is the most important underlying third-party framework and Sakai spends a lot of its time manipulating XML.  

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Master Data Services Master Data Services overview Master Data Services is Microsoft's Master Data Management product that ships with SQL Server 2008 R2. Much like other parts of SQL Server, such as Analysis Services (SSAS) or Reporting Services (SSRS), MDS doesn't get installed along with the database engine, but is a separate product in its own right. Unlike SSAS or SSRS, it's worth noting that MDS is only available in the Enterprise and Data Centre Editions of SQL Server, and that the server must be 64-bit. MDS is a product that has grown from acquisition, as it is based on the +EDM product that Microsoft obtained when they bought the Atlanta-based company called Stratature in 2007. A great deal of work has been carried out since the acquisition, including changing the user interface and putting in a web service layer. At a high level, the new product has the following features: Entity maintenance—MDS supports data stewardship by allowing users to add, edit, and delete members. The tool is not specific to a particular industry or area, but instead is generic enough to work across a variety of subject domains. Modeling capability—MDS contains interfaces that allow administrative users to create data models to hold entity members. Hierarchy management—Relationships between members can be utilized to produce hierarchies that users can alter. Version management—Copies of entity data and related metadata can be archived to create an entirely separate version of the data. Business rules and workflow—A comprehensive business rules engine is included in order to enforce data quality and assist with data stewardship via workflow. Alerts can be sent to users using e-mail when the business rules encounter a particular condition. Security—A granular security model is included, where it is possible, for example, to prevent a given user from accessing certain entities, attributes, and members. Master Data Services architecture Technically, Master Data Services consists of the following components: SQL Server Database—The database holds the entities such as Customer or Product, whether they are imported from other systems or created in MDS. Master Data Manager—A web-based data stewardship and administration portal that amongst many other features allows data stewards to add, edit, and delete entity members. Web Service Layer—All calls to the database from the front-end go through a WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) web service. Internet Information Services (IIS) is used to host the web services and the Master Data Manager application. Workflow Integration Service—A Windows service that acts as a broker between MDS and SharePoint in order to allow MDS business rules to use SharePoint workflows. Configuration Manager—A windows application that allows key settings to be altered by an administrator. The following diagram shows how the components interact with one another: MDS SQL Server database The MDS database uses a mix of components in order to be the master data store and to support the functionality found in the Master Data Manager, including stored procedures, views, and functions. Separate tables are created both for entities and for their supporting objects, all of which happens on the fly when a new object gets created in Master Data Manager. The data for all entities across all subject areas are stored in the same database, meaning that the database could get quite big if several subject domains are being managed. The tables themselves are created with a code name. For example, on my local installation, the Product entity is not stored in a table called "Product" as you might expect, but in a table called "tbl_2_10_EN". Locating entity data The exact table that contains the data for a particular entity can be found by writing a select statement against the view called viw_SYSTEM_SCHEMA_ENTITY in the mdm schema. As well as containing a number of standard SQL Server table-valued and scalar functions, the MDS database also contains a handful of .Net CLR (Common Language Runtime)-based functions, which can be found in the mdq schema. The functions utilize the Microsoft.MasterDataServices.DataQuality assembly and are used to assist with data quality and the merging, de-duplication, and survivorship exercises that are often required in a master data management solution. Some of the actions in MDS, such as the e-mail alerts or loading of large amounts of data, need to happen in an asynchronous manner. Service Broker is utilized to allow users to continue to use the front-end without having to wait for long running processes to complete. Although strictly outside the MDS database, SQL Server Database Mail, which resides in the system msdb database, is used as the mechanism to send e-mail alerts to subscribing users. In addition to the tables that hold the master data entities, the MDS database also contains a set of staging tables that should be used when importing data into MDS. Once the staging tables have been populated correctly, the staged data can be loaded into the master data store in a single batch. Internet Information Services (IIS) During the initial configuration of MDS, an IIS Web Application will get created within an IIS website. The name of the application that gets created is called "MDS", although this can be over-ridden if needed. The Web Application contains a Virtual Directory that points to the physical path of <Drive>:<install location>WebApplication, where the various components of the Master Data Manager application are stored. The MDS WCF Service called Service.svc is also located in the same directory. The service can be exposed in order to provide a unified access point to any MDS functionality (for example, creating an entity or member, retrieving all entity members) that is needed by other applications. Master Data Manager connects to the WCF service, which then connects to the database, so this is the route that should be taken by other applications, instead of connecting to the database directly.

jQuery Mobile First Look Discover the endless possibilities offered by jQuery Mobile for rapid Mobile Web Development          The reader would benefit by referring the previous article on How to Use jQuery Mobile Grid and Columns Layout. A note on collapsible blocks On a completely different note, jQuery Mobile provides an easy-to-use and visually-appealing solution to hide and show content, namely, the so-called collapsible blocks. Collapsible blocks should be already well-known to the web designers out there, and they have gained in popularity especially after the advent of JavaScript libraries and frameworks like jQuery, which have made writing the necessary code a matter of minutes to obtain a pane which shows its content once a button (or any kind of element, actually) is clicked. The following screenshot shows how jQuery Mobile renders, by default, any collapsible block we include into our web page: So, how do we create a (set of) collapsible block(s)? Collapsible blocks are obtained by assigning a container the data-role="collapsible" attribute. As easy as that. <div data-role="collapsible"> <!-- this is a collapsible block --> </div> The jQuery Mobile framework needs a heading element to be present inside the container. The heading (which can be from h1 through h6) will be styled like a clickable button, and a plus (+) symbol will be added to its left to indicate it's expandable. Once we click the header/button and the content shows, a minus (-) symbol will replace the plus to indicate it's collapsible. Where do I put the heading? The heading can be placed anywhere inside the container. Remember that jQuery Mobile will use as a header the very first h-element it finds inside the container, and remove it from its original position. Once the required header is provided, you can add any other h-element to the container and it will not be processed (that is, it will behave like a normal heading would). <div data-role="collapsible"> <h3>Collapsible block header</h3> <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet etc....</p> </div> We used an h3 heading in this example, but any other heading would have looked just the same: jQuery Mobile changes completely the style of the heading to match a button's style. We can specify whether we want a collapsible block to be expanded on page load or not by adding the data-collapsed="true" attribute to the container: <div data-role="collapsible" data-collapsed="true"> <h3>This block will be collapsed (does not show content)</h3> <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet etc....</p> </div> <div data-role="collapsible"> <h3>This block will expand on page load</h3> <p>This text is visible right away!</p> </div> Nested collapsible blocks Collapsible blocks can also be nested, resulting in a series of blocks which control various paragraphs and content: To create a set of nested collapsible blocks, we only need to insert a block into another block, which will be its container: <!-- Top level collapsible block --> <div data-role="collapsible"> <h3>Collapsible block header</h3> <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.</p> <!-- nested collapsible block --> <div data-role="collapsible"> <h3>Nested collapsible block</h3> <p>Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos.</p> </div> </div> We may have any number of collapsible blocks nested; for example, here is another one: <!-- Top level collapsible block --> <div data-role="collapsible"> <h3>Collapsible block header</h3> <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.</p> <!-- nested collapsible block --> <div data-role="collapsible"> <h3>Nested collapsible block</h3> <p>Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos.</p> <!-- nested into a nested block --> <div data-role="collapsible"> <h3>Nested into a nested collapsible block</h3> <p>Integer lectus eros, accumsan eget ultrices vel, sagittis volutpat odio.</p> </div> </div> </div>  

  Alice 3 Cookbook 79 recipes to harness the power of Alice 3 for teaching students to build attractive and interactive 3D scenes and videos         Read more about this book       (For more resources related to this subject, see here.) Introduction You need to organize the statements that request the different actors to perform actions. Alice 3 provides blocks that allow us to configure the order in which many statements should be executed. This article provides many tasks that will allow us to start controlling the behavior of animations with many actors performing different actions. We will execute many actions with a specific order. We will use counters to run one or more statements many times. We will execute actions for many actors of the same class. We will run code for different actors at the same time to render complex animations. Performing many statements in order In this recipe, we will execute many statements for an actor with a specific order. We will add eight statements to control a sequence of movements for a bee. Getting ready We have to be working on a project with at least one actor. Therefore, we will create a new project and set a simple scene with a few actors. Select File | New... in the main menu to start a new project. A dialog box will display the six predefined templates with their thumbnail previews in the Templates tab. Select GrassyProject.a3p as the desired template for the new project and click on OK. Alice will display a grassy ground with a light blue sky. Click on Edit Scene, at the lower right corner of the scene preview. Alice will show a bigger preview of the scene and will display the Model Gallery at the bottom. Add an instance of the Bee class to the scene, and enter bee for the name of this new instance. First, Alice will create the MyBee class to extend Bee. Then, Alice will create an instance of MyBee named bee. Follow the steps explained in the Creating a new instance from a class in a gallery recipe, in the article, Alice 3: Making Simple Animations with Actors. Add an instance of the PurpleFlower class, and enter purpleFlower for the name of this new instance. Add another instance of the PurpleFlower class, and enter purpleFlower2 for the name of this new instance. The additional flower may be placed on top of the previously added flower. Add an instance of the ForestSky class to the scene. Place the bee and the two flowers as shown in the next screenshot: How to do it... Follow these steps to execute many statements for the bee with a specific order: Open an existing project with one actor added to the scene. Click on Edit Code, at the lower-right corner of the big scene preview. Alice will show a smaller preview of the scene and will display the Code Editor on a panel located at the right-hand side of the main window. Click on the class: MyScene drop-down list and the list of classes that are part of the scene will appear. Select MyScene | Edit run. Select the desired actor in the instance drop-down list located at the left-hand side of the main window, below the small scene preview. For example, you can select bee. Make sure that part: none is selected in the drop-down list located at the right-hand side of the chosen instance. Activate the Procedures tab. Alice will display the procedures for the previously selected actor. Drag the pointAt procedure and drop it in the drop statement here area located below the do in order label, inside the run tab. Because the instance name is bee, the pointAt statement contains the this.bee and pointAt labels followed by the target parameter and its question marks ???. A list with all the possible instances to pass to the first parameter will appear. Click on this.purpleFlower. The following code will be displayed, as shown in the next screenshot: this.bee.pointAt(this.purpleFlower) Drag the moveTo procedure and drop it below the previously dropped procedure call. A list with all the possible instances to pass to the first parameter will appear. Select this.purpleFlower getPart ??? and then IStemMiddle_IStemTop_IHPistil_IHPetal01, as shown in the following screenshot: Click on the more... drop-down menu button that appears at the right-hand side of the recently dropped statement. Click on duration and then on 1.0 in the cascade menu that appears. Click on the new more... drop-down menu that appears. Click on style and then on BEGIN_AND_END_ABRUPTLY. The following code will be displayed as the second statement: this.bee.moveTo(this.purpleFlower.getPart(IStemMiddle_IStemTop_IHPistil_IHPetal01), duration: 1.0, style: BEGIN_AND_END_ABRUPTLY) Drag the delay procedure and drop it below the previously dropped procedure call. A list with all the predefined direction values to pass to the first parameter will appear. Select 2.0 and the following code will be displayed as the third statement: this.bee.delay(2.0) Drag the moveAwayFrom procedure and drop it below the previously dropped procedure call. Select 0.25 for the first parameter. Click on the more... drop-down menu button that appears and select this.purpleFlower getPart ??? and then IStemMiddle_IStemTop_IHPistil_IHPetal01. Click on the additional more... drop-down menu button, on duration and then on 1.0 in the cascade menu that appears. Click on the new more... drop-down menu that appears, on style and then on BEGIN_ABRUPTLY_AND_END_GENTLY. The following code will be displayed as the fourth statement: this.bee.moveAwayFrom(0.25, this.purpleFlower.getPart(IStemMiddle_IStemTop_IHPistil_IHPetal01), duration: 1.0, style: BEGIN_ABRUPTLY_AND_END_GENTLY) Drag the turnToFace procedure and drop it below the previously dropped procedure call. Select this.purpleFlower2 getPart ??? and then IStemMiddle_IStemTop_IHPistil_IHPetal05. Click on the additional more... drop-down menu button, on duration and then on 1.0 in the cascade menu that appears. Click on the new more... drop-down menu that appears, on style and then on BEGIN_ABRUPTLY_AND_END_GENTLY. The following code will be displayed as the fifth statement: this.bee.turnToFace(this.purpleFlower2.getPart(IStemMiddle_IStemTop_IHPistil_IHPetal05), duration: 1.0, style: BEGIN_ABRUPTLY_AND_END_GENTLY) Drag the moveTo procedure and drop it below the previously dropped procedure call. Select this.purpleFlower2 getPart ??? and then IStemMiddle_IStemTop_IHPistil_IHPetal05. Click on the additional more... drop-down menu button, on duration and then on 1.0 in the cascade menu that appears. Click on the new more... drop-down menu that appears, on style and then on BEGIN_AND_END_ABRUPTLY. The following code will be displayed as the sixth statement: this.bee.moveTo(this.purpleFlower2.getPart(IStemMiddle_IStemTop_IHPistil_IHPetal05), duration: 1.0, style: BEGIN_AND_END_GENTLY) Drag the delay procedure and drop it below the previously dropped procedure call. A list with all the predefined direction values to pass to the first parameter will appear. Select 2.0 and the following code will be displayed as the seventh statement: this.bee.delay(2.0) Drag the move procedure and drop it below the previously dropped procedure call. Select FORWARD and then 10.0. Click on the more... drop-down menu button, on duration and then on 10.0 in the cascade menu that appears. Click on the additional more... drop-down menu that appears, on asSeenBy and then on this.bee. Click on the new more... drop-down menu that appears, on style and then on BEGIN_AND_END_ABRUPTLY. The following code will be displayed as the eighth and final statement. The following screenshot shows the eight statements that compose the run procedure: this.bee.move(FORWARD, duration: 10.0, asSeenBy: this.bee, style: BEGIN_ABRUPTLY_AND_END_GENTLY) (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it.) Select File | Save as... from Alice's main menu and give a new name to the project. Then you can make changes to the project according to your needs. How it works... When we run a project, Alice creates the scene instance, creates and initializes all the instances that compose the scene, and finally executes the run method defined in the MyScene class. By default, the statements we add to a procedure are included within the do in order block. We added eight statements to the do in order block, and therefore Alice will begin with the first statement: this.bee.pointAt(this.purpleFlower) Once the bee finishes executing the pointAt procedure, the execution flow goes on with the next statement specified in the do in order block. Thus, Alice will execute the following second statement after the first one finishes: this.bee.moveTo(this.purpleFlower.getPart(IStemMiddle_IStemTop_IHPistil_IHPetal01), duration: 1.0, style: BEGIN_AND_END_ABRUPTLY) The do in order statement encapsulates a group of statements with a synchronous execution. Thus, when we add many statements within a do in order block, these statements will run one after the other. Each statement requires its previous statement to finish before starting its execution, and therefore we can use the do in order block to group statements that must run with a specific order. The moveTo procedure moves the 3D model that represents the actor until it reaches the position of the other actor. The value for the target parameter is the instance of the other actor. We want the bee to move to one of the petals of the first flower, purpleFlower, and therefore we passed this value to the target parameter: this.purpleFlower.getPart(IStemMiddle_IStemTop_IHPistil_IHPetal01) We called the getPart function for purpleFlower with IStemMiddle_IStemTop_IHPistil_IHPetal01 as the name of the part to return. This function allows us to retrieve one petal from the flower as an instance. We used the resulting instance as the target parameter for the moveTo procedure and we could make the bee move to the specific petal of the flower. Once the bee finishes executing the moveTo procedure, the execution flow goes on with the next statement specified in the do in order block. Thus, Alice will execute the following third statement after the second one finishes: this.bee.delay(2.0) The delay procedure puts the actor to sleep in its current position for the specified number of seconds. The next statement specified in the do in order block will run after waiting for two seconds. The statements added to the run procedure will perform the following visible actions in the specified order: Point the bee at purpleFlower. Begin and end abruptly a movement for the bee from its position to the petal named IStemMiddle_IStemTop_IHPistil_IHPetal01 of purpleFlower. The total duration for the animation must be 1 second. Make the bee stay in its position for 2 seconds. Move the bee away 0.25 units from the position of the petal named IStemMiddle_IStemTop_IHPistil_IHPetal01 of purpleFlower. Begin the movement abruptly but end it gently. The total duration for the animation must be 1 second. Turn the bee to the face of the petal named IStemMiddle_IStemTop_IHPistil_IHPetal05 of purpleFlower2. Begin the movement abruptly but end it gently. The total duration for the animation must be 1 second. Begin and end abruptly a movement for the bee from its position to the petal named IStemMiddle_IStemTop_IHPistil_IHPetal05 of purpleFlower2. The total duration for the animation must be 1 second. Make the bee stay in its position for 2 seconds. Move the bee forward 10 units. Begin the movement abruptly but end it gently. The total duration for the animation must be 10 seconds. The bee will disappear from the scene. The following screenshot shows six screenshots of the rendered frames: (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it.) There's more... When you work with the Alice code editor, you can temporarily disable statements. Alice doesn't execute the disabled statements. However, you can enable them again later. It is useful to disable one or more statements when you want to test the results of running the project without these statements, but you might want to enable them back to compare the results. To disable a statement, right-click on it and deactivate the IsEnabled option, as shown in the following screenshot: The disabled statements will appear with diagonal lines, as shown in the next screenshot, and won't be considered at run-time: To enable a disabled statement, right-click on it and activate the IsEnabled option.

  jQuery Mobile First Look Discover the endless possibilities offered by jQuery Mobile for rapid Mobile Web Development Trying to communicate and provide information in an effective way can be a little trickier when we are targeting mobile devices; their screens are relatively small (ridiculously small if we think about our 24 inch iMac resting on our office desk), and we have already understood that we cannot display content in the way we used to, back in the days when desktop computers were the only way to access data on the Internet. With the advent of mobile browsing, new solutions had to be found. The jQuery Mobile framework provides a number of tools, widgets, and components which are extremely helpful in formatting our content and make it look elegant and put-together even on our beloved smaller-screen devices – well, especially for them! In fact, the difficulty in designing, formatting, and correctly showing a page on a mobile device is going to become a no-brainer using the set of elements jQuery Mobile provides in order to allow for an easy styling of our web application content. How content is displayed Yes, there is nothing wrong in just writing down what our website or web application is about in the HTML file. It's always worked and always will. The actual point here is taking advantage of the tools jQuery Mobile offers us to format our information, specifically for mobile devices. For example, there are occasions in which the need for multiple columns may arise: we can use a layout grid, which is nothing more than some CSS-based columns. Or, on a completely different note, we might just need to hide/show a block of content: collapsible blocks have been designed for this, and can be easily implemented in our site layout. But before we begin analyzing any of the methods in which we are able to format our content according to our liking, we should take a look at how content is displayed in its basic HTML formatting. Based upon the "light hand approach" (as they call it), jQuery Mobile lets the browser rendering take precedence over any other third-party styling, with exceptions made for the following little tweaks the framework applies to any page by default: Adding a bit of padding for a better readability Using the theming system to apply fonts and colors This particular approach to styling by default should make the designers really happy, as they often find themselves fighting with preset colors schemes, default fonts, weird margin, and padding values and usually end up resetting everything and starting again from scratch. Thankfully, the default padding value looks quite right and, as far as theming goes, we are able to easily customize (and create new) themes through CSS files and a theming framework which is extremely versatile and flexible. Default HTML markup styling So, what happens if we just write some HTML markup and want some text to be bold, emphasized, or hyper-linked? jQuery Mobile applies some basic styling to the elements and makes their look consistent with the simple and clean layout we have already seen in action. The following screenshot represents how headings and standard paragraphs are displayed and generated by the following code: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Default HTML markup styling</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0a2/ jquery.mobile-1.0a2.min.css" /> <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.3.min.js"></script> <script src="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0a2/jquery.mobile- 1.0a2.min.js"></script> </head> <body> <div data-role="page" id="home"> <div data-role="content"> <h1>H1 Heading</h1> <h2>H2 Heading</h2> <h3>H3 Heading</h3> <h4>H4 Heading</h4> <h5>H5 Heading</h5> <h6>H6 Heading</h6> <p>This is a paragraph. <strong>Lorem (bold)</strong> <em>ipsum (emphasized)</em> <a href="#">dolor (link)</a> sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.</p> <blockquote>Blockquote containing a <cite>cite</cite></ blockquote> <p>This is a paragraph. <strong>Lorem (bold)</strong> <em>ipsum (emphasized)</em> <a href="#">dolor (link)</a> sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.</p> </div> </div> </body> </html> The result is shown in the following screenshot: Similarly, the following code produces a preview of what lists and tables look like: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Default HTML markup styling</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0a2/ jquery.mobile-1.0a2.min.css" /> <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.3.min.js"></script> <script src="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0a2/jquery.mobile- 1.0a2.min.js"></script> </head> <body> <div data-role="page" id="home"> <div data-role="content"> <ul> <li>Unordered list item 1</li> <li>Unordered list item 2</li> <li>Unordered list item 3</li> </ul> <ol> <li>Ordered list item 1</li> <li>Ordered list item 2</li> <li>Ordered list item 3</li> </ol> <table> <caption>Table caption</caption> <thead> <tr> <th scope="col">Name</th> <th scope="col">City</th> <th scope="col">Phone</th> </tr> </thead> <tfoot> <tr> <td colspan="5">Table foot</td> </tr> </tfoot> <tbody> <tr> <th scope="row">David Green</th> <td>New York City, NY</td> <td>555-0123</td> </tr> <tr> <th scope="row">Martha White</th> <td>Los Angels, CA</td> <td>555-0188</td> </tr> <tr> <th scope="row">Bobby Brown</th> <td>Washington, D.C.</td> <td>555-0110</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </div> </body> </html>

Drupal 7 Themes Create new themes for your Drupal 7 site with a clean layout and powerful CSS styling    With the arrival of Drupal 6, sub-theming really came to the forefront of theme design. While previously many people copied themes and then re-worked them to achieve their goals, that process became less attractive as sub-themes came into favor. This article focuses on sub-theming and how it should be used to customize an existing theme. We'll start by looking at how to set up a workspace for Drupal theming. Setting up the workspace Before you get too far into attempting to modify your theme files, you should put some thought into your tools. There are several software applications that can make your work modifying themes more efficient. Though no specific tools are required to work with Drupal themes, you could do it all with just a text editor—there are a couple of applications that you might want to consider adding to your tool kit. The first item to consider is browser selection. Firefox has a variety of extensions that make working with themes easier. The Web Developer extension, for example, is hugely helpful when dealing with CSS and related issues. We recommend the combination of Firefox and the Web developer extension to anyone working with Drupal themes. Another extension popular with many developers is Firebug, which is very similar to the Web developer extension, and is indeed more powerful in several regards. Pick up Web developer, Firebug, and other popular Firefox add-ons at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/. There are also certain utilities you can add into your Drupal installation that will assist with theming the site. Two modules you definitely will want to install are Devel and Theme developer. Theme developer can save you untold hours of digging around trying to find the right function or template. When the module is active all you need to do is click on an element and the Theme developer pop-up window will show you what is generating the element, along with other useful information like potential template suggestions. The Devel module performs a number of functions and is a prerequisite for running Theme developer. Download Devel from: http://drupal.org/project/devel. You can find Theme developer at: http://drupal.org/project/devel_themer. Note that neither Devel nor Theme Developer are suitable for use in a development environment—you don't want these installed and enabled on a client's public site, as they can present a security risk. When it comes to working with PHP files and the various theme files, you will also need a good code editor. There's a whole world of options out there, and the right choice for you is really a personal decision. Suffice it to say: as long as you are comfortable with it, it's probably the right choice. Setting up a local development server Another key component of your workspace is the ability to preview your work—preferably locally. As a practical matter, previewing Drupal themes requires the use of a server; themes are difficult to preview with any accuracy without a server to execute the PHP code. While you can work on a remote server on your webhost, often this is undesirable due to latency or simple lack of availability. A quick solution to this problem is to set up a local server using something like the XAMPP package (or the MAMP package for Mac OSX). XAMPP provides a one step installer containing everything you need to set up a server environment on your local machine (Apache, MySQL, PHP, phpMyAdmin, and more). Visit http://www.ApacheFriends.org to download XAMPP and you can have your own Dev Server set up on your local machine in no time at all. Follow these steps to acquire the XAMPP installation package and get it set up on your local machine: Connect to the Internet and direct your browser to http://www.apachefriends.org. Select XAMPP from the main menu. Click the link labeled XAMPP for Windows. Click the .zip option under the heading XAMPP for Windows. Note that you will be re-directed to the SourceForge site for the actual download. When the pop-up prompts you to save the file, click OK and the installer will download to your computer. Locate the downloaded archive (.zip) package on your local machine, and double-click it. Double-click the new file to start the installer. Follow the steps in the installer and then click Finish to close the installer. That's all there is to it. You now have all the elements you need for your own local development server. To begin, simply open the XAMPP application and you will see buttons that allow you to start the servers. To create a new website, simply copy the files into a directory placed inside the /htdocs directory. You can then access your new site by opening the URL in your browser, as follows: http://localhost/sitedirectoryname. As a final note, you may also want to have access to a graphics program to handle editing any image files that might be part of your theme. Again, there is a world of options out there and the right choice is up to you. Planning the modifications A proper dissertation on site planning and usability are beyond the scope of this article. Similarly, this article is neither an HTML nor a CSS tutorial; accordingly, in this article we are going to focus on identifying the issues and delineating the process involved in the customization of an existing theme, rather than focusing on design techniques or coding-specific changes. Any time you set off down the path of transforming an existing theme into something new, you need to spend some time planning. The principle here is the same as in many other areas. A little time spent planning at the frontend of a project can pay off big in savings later. When it comes to planning your theming efforts, the very first question you have to answer is whether you are going to customize an existing theme or whether you will create a new theme. In either event, it is recommended that you work with sub-themes. The key difference is the nature of the base theme you select, that is, the theme you are going to choose as your starting point. In sub-theming, the base theme is the starting point. Sub-themes inherit the parent theme's resources; hence, the base theme you select will shape your theme building. Some base themes are extremely simple, designed to impose on the themer the fewest restrictions; others are designed to give you the widest range of resources to assist your efforts. However, since you can use any theme for a base theme, the reality is that most themes fall in between, at least in terms of their suitability for use as a base theme. Another way to think of the relationship between a base theme and a subtheme is in terms of a parent-child relationship. The child (sub-theme) inherits its characteristics from its parent (the base theme). There are no limits to the ability to chain together multiple parent-child relationships; a sub-theme can be the child of another sub-theme. When it comes to customizing an existing theme, the reality is often that the selection of the base theme will be dictated by the theme's default appearance and feature set; in other words, you are likely to select the theme that is already the closest to what you want. That said, don't limit yourself to a shallow surface examination of the theme. In order to make the best decision, you need to look carefully at the underlying theme's file and structures and see if it truly is the best choice. While the original theme may be fairly close to what you want, it may also have limitations that require work to overcome. Sometimes it is actually faster to start with a more generic theme that you already know and can work with easily. Learning someone else's code is always a bit of a chore and themes are like any other code—some are great, some are poor, most are simply okay. A best practices theme makes your life easier. In simplest terms, the process of customizing an existing theme can be broken into three steps: Select your base theme. Create a sub-theme from your base theme. Make the changes to your new sub-theme. Why it is not recommended to simply modify the theme directly? There are two following reasons: First, best practices say not to touch the original files; leave them intact so you can upgrade them without losing customizations. Second, as a matter of theming philosophy, it's better to leave the things you don't need to change in the base theme and focus your sub-theme on only the things you want to change. This approach to theming is more manageable and makes for much easier testing as you go. Selecting a base theme For the sake of simplicity, in this article, we are going to work with the default Bartik theme. We'll take Bartik, create a new sub-theme and then modify the subtheme to create the customized theme. Let's call the new theme "JeanB". Note that while we've named the theme "JeanB", when it comes to naming the theme's directory, we will use "jeanb" as the system only supports lowercase letters and underscores. In order to make the example easier to follow and to avoid the need to install a variety of third-party extensions, the modifications we will make in this article will be done using only the default components. Arguably, when you are building a site like this for deployment in the real world (rather than simply for skills development) you might wish to consider implementing one or more specialized third-party extensions to handle certain tasks.

  vtiger CRM Beginner's Guide Record and consolidate all your customer information with vtiger CRM    To go through the exercises in this article, you'll need basic knowledge of HTML. If you already understand basic web development concepts, then you'll also be well prepared to delve into vtiger CRM's API. The vtiger CRM API For you developers out there, all of the ins and outs of vtiger CRM's API are fully documented at http://api.vtiger.com. For those of you not familiar with API's, API stands for Application Programming Interface. It's an interface for computers rather than humans. What does the API do? To illustrate—you can access the human interface of vtiger CRM by logging in with your username and password. The screens that are shown to you with all of the buttons and links make up the human interface. An API, on the other hand, is an interface for other computers. Computers don't need the fancy stuff that we humans do in the interface—it's all text. What is the benefit of the API? With an API, vtiger allows other computer systems to inform it and also ask it questions. This makes everyone's life easier, especially if it means you don't have to type the same data twice into two systems. Here's an example. You have a website where people make sales inquiries and you capture that information as a sales lead. You might receive that information as an email. At that point you could just leave the data in your email and refer to it as needed (which many people still do) or you could enter it into a CRM tool like vtiger so you can keep track of your leads. You can take it one step further by using vtiger's API. You can tell your website how to talk to vtiger's API and now your website can send the leads directly into vtiger, and...Voila! When you log in, the person who just made an inquiry on your website is now a lead in vtiger. Sending a lead into vtiger CRM from your website Well, what are we waiting for?! Let's give it a try. There is a plugin/extension in vtiger called Webforms and it uses the vtiger API to get data into vtiger. In the following exercises, we're going to: Configure the Webforms plugin Create a webform on your company website IMPORTANT NOTE: If you want to be able to send leads into vtiger from your website, your vtiger installation must be accessible on the Internet. If you have installed vtiger on a computer or server on your internal network, then you won't be able to send leads into vtiger from your website, because your website won't be able to connect with the computer/server that vtiger is running on. Time for action – configuring the Webforms plugin OK, let's roll up our sleeves and get ready to do a little code editing. Let's take a look first: Let's navigate to the Webforms configuration file in vtigercrm/modules/Webforms/Webforms.config.php Let's open it up with a text editor like Notepad. Here's what it might look like by default: <?php /*+************************************************************** ******************* * The contents of this file are subject to the vtiger CRM Public License Version 1.0 * ("License"); You may not use this file except in compliance with the License * The Original Code is: vtiger CRM Open Source * The Initial Developer of the Original Code is vtiger. * Portions created by vtiger are Copyright (C) vtiger. * All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** *******************/ $enableAppKeyValidation = true; $defaultUserName = 'admin'; $defaultUserAccessKey = 'iFOdqrI8lS5UhNTa'; $defaultOwner = 'admin'; $successURL = ''; $failureURL = ''; /** * JSON or HTML. if incase success and failure URL is NOT specified. */ $defaultSuccessAction = 'HTML'; $defaultSuccessMessage = 'LBL_SUCCESS'; ?> We have to be concerned with several lines here. Specifically, they're the ones that contain the following: $defaultUserName: This will most likely be the admin user, although it can be any user that you create in your vtiger CRM system. $defaultUserAccessKey: This key is used for authentication when your website will access vtiger's API. You can access this key by logging in to vtiger and clicking on the My Preferences link at the top right. It needs to be the key for the username assigned to the $defaultUserName variable. $defaultOwner: This user will be assigned all of the new leads created by this form by default. $successURL: If the lead submission is successful, this is the URL to which you want to send the user after they entered their information. This would typically be a web page that would thank the user for their submission and provide any additional sales information. $failureURL: This is the URL which you want to send the user if the submission fails. This would typically be a web page that would say something like, "We apologize, but something has gone wrong. Please try again". Now you'll need to fill in the values with the information from our own installation of vtiger CRM. Save the Webforms.config.php and close it. We've finished completing the configuration of the Webforms module. What just happened? We configured the Webforms module in vtiger CRM. We modified the Webform plugin's configuration file, Webforms.config.php. Now the Webforms module will: Be able to authenticate lead submissions that come from your website Assign all new leads to the admin user by default (you'll be able to change this) Send the user to a thank you page, should the lead submission into vtiger succeed Send the user to an "Oops" page, should the lead submission into vtiger fail  

  Pentaho Data Integration 4 Cookbook Over 70 recipes to solve ETL problems using Pentaho Kettle       Introduction Kettle, also known as PDI, is mostly used as a stand-alone application. However, it is not an isolated tool, but part of the Pentaho Business Intelligence Suite. As such, it can also interact with other components of the suite; for example, as the datasource for a report, or as part of a bigger process. This chapter shows you how to run Kettle jobs and transformations in that context. The article assumes a basic knowledge of the Pentaho BI platform and the tools that made up the Pentaho Suite. If you are not familiar with these tools, it is recommended that you visit the wiki page (wiki.pentaho.com) or the Pentaho BI Suite Community Edition (CE) site: http://community.pentaho.com/. As another option, you can get the Pentaho Solutions book (Wiley) by Roland Bouman and Jos van Dongen that gives you a good introduction to the whole suite. A sample transformation The different recipes in this article show you how to run Kettle transformations and jobs integrated with several components of the Pentaho BI suite. In order to focus on the integration itself rather than on Kettle development, we have created a sample transformation named weather.ktr that will be used through the different recipes. The transformation receives the name of a city as the first parameter from the command line, for example Madrid, Spain. Then, it consumes a web service to get the current weather conditions and the forecast for the next five days for that city. The transformation has a couple of named parameters: The following diagram shows what the transformation looks like: It receives the command-line argument and the named parameters, calls the service, and retrieves the information in the desired scales for temperature and wind speed. You can download the transformation from the book's site and test it. Do a preview on the next_days, current_conditions, and current_conditions_normalized steps to see what the results look like. The following is a sample preview of the next_days step: The following is a sample preview of the current_conditions step: Finally, the following screenshot shows you a sample preview of the current_conditions_normalized step: There is also another transformation named weather_np.ktr. This transformation does exactly the same, but it reads the city as a named parameter instead of reading it from the command line. The Getting ready sections of each recipe will tell you which of these transformations will be used. Avoiding consuming the web service It may happen that you do not want to consume the web service (for example, for delay reasons), or you cannot do it (for example, if you do not have Internet access). Besides, if you call a free web service like this too often, then your IP might be banned from the service. Don't worry. Along with the sample transformations on the book's site, you will find another version of the transformations that instead of using the web service, reads sample fictional data from a file containing the forecast for over 250 cities. The transformations are weather (file version).ktr and weather_np (file version).ktr. Feel free to use these transformations instead. You should not have any trouble as the parameters and the metadata of the data retrieved are exactly the same as in the transformations explained earlier. If you use transformations that do not call the web service, remember that they rely on the file with the fictional data (weatheroffline.txt). Wherever you copy the transformations, do not forget to copy that file as well. Creating a Pentaho report with data coming from PDI The Pentaho Reporting Engine allows designing, creating, and distributing reports in various popular formats (HTML, PDF, and so on) from different kind of sources (JDBC, OLAP, XML, and so on). There are occasions where you need other kinds of sources such as text files or Excel files, or situations where you must process the information before using it in a report. In those cases, you can use the output of a Kettle transformation as the source of your report. This recipe shows you this capability of the Pentaho Reporting Engine. For this recipe, you will develop a very simple report: The report will ask for a city and a temperature scale and will report the current conditions in that city. The temperature will be expressed in the selected scale. Getting ready A basic understanding of the Pentaho Report Designer tool is required in order to follow this recipe. You should be able to create a report, add parameters, build a simple report, and preview the final result. Regarding the software, you will need the Pentaho Report Designer. You can download the latest version from the following URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pentaho/files/Report%20Designer/ You will also need the sample transformation weather.ktr. The sample transformation has a couple of UDJE steps. These steps rely on the Janino library. In order to be able to run the transformation from Report Designer, you will have to copy the janino.jar file from the Kettle libext directory into the Report Designer lib directory. How to do it... In the first part of the recipe, you will create the report and define the parameters for the report: the city and the temperature scale. Launch Pentaho Report Designer and create a new blank report. Add two mandatory parameters: A parameter named city_param, with Lisbon, Portugal as Default Value and a parameter named scale_param which accepts two possible values: C meaning Celsius or F meaning Fahrenheit. Now, you will define the data source for the report: In the Data menu, select Add Data Source and then Pentaho Data Integration. Click on the Add a new query button. A new query named Query 1 will be added. Give the query a proper name, for example, forecast. Click on the Browse button. Browse to the sample transformation and select it. The Steps listbox will be populated with the names of the steps in the transformation. Select the step current_conditions. So far, you have the following: The specification of the transformation file name with the complete path will work only inside Report Designer. Before publishing the report, you should edit the file name (C:Pentahoreportingweather.ktr in the preceding example) and leave just a path relative to the directory where the report is to be published (for example, reportsweather.ktr). Click on Preview; you will see an empty resultset. The important thing here is that the headers should be the same as the output fields of the current_conditions step: city, observation_time, weatherDesc, and so on. Now, close that window and click on Edit Parameters. You will see two grids: Transformation Parameter and Transformation Arguments. Fill in the grids as shown in the following screenshot. You can type the values or select them from the available drop-down lists: Close the Pentaho Data Integration Data Source window. You should have the following: The data coming from Kettle is ready to be used in your report. Build the report layout: Drag and drop some fields into the canvas and arrange them as you please. Provide a title as well. The following screenshot is a sample report you can design: Now, you can do a Print Preview. The sample report above will look like the one shown in the following screenshot: Note that the output of the current_condition step has just one row. If for data source you choose the next_days or the current_condition_normalized step instead, then the result will have several rows. In that case, you could design a report by columns: one column for each field. How it works... Using the output of a Kettle transformation as the data source of a report is very useful because you can take advantage of all the functionality of the PDI tool. For instance, in this case you built a report based on the result of consuming a web service. You could not have done this with Pentaho Report Designer alone. In order to use the output of your Kettle transformation, you just added a Pentaho Data Integration datasource. You selected the transformation to run and the step that would deliver your data. In order to be executed, your transformation needs a command-line parameter: the name of the city. The transformation also defines two named parameters: the temperature scale and the wind scale. From the Pentaho Report Designer you provided both—a value for the city and a value for the temperature scale. You did it by filling in the Edit Parameter setting window inside the Pentaho Data Integration Data Source window. Note that you did not supply a value for the SPEED named parameter, but that is not necessary because Kettle uses the default value. As you can see in the recipe, the data source created by the report engine has the same structure as the data coming from the selected step: the same fields with the same names, same data types, and in the same order. Once you configured this data source, you were able to design your report as you would have done with any other kind of data source. Finally, when you are done and want to publish your report on the server, do not forget to fix the path as explained in the recipe—the File should be specified with a path relative to the solution folder. For example, suppose that your report will be published in my_solution/reports, and you put the transformation file in my_solution/reports/resources. In that case, for File, you should type resources/ plus the name of the transformation. There's more... Pentaho Reporting is a suite of Java projects built for report generation. The suite is made up of the Pentaho Reporting Engine and a set of tools such as the Report Designer (the tool used in this recipe), Report Design Wizard, and Pentaho's web-based Ad Hoc Reporting user interface. In order to be able to run transformations, the Pentaho Reporting software includes the Kettle libraries. To avoid any inconvenience, be sure that the versions of the libraries included are the same or newer than the version of Kettle you are using. For instance, Pentaho Reporting 3.8 includes Kettle 4.1.2 libraries. If you are using a different version of Pentaho Reporting, then you can verify the Kettle version by looking in the lib folder inside the reporting installation folder. You should look for files named kettle-core-<version>.jar, kettle-db-<version>.jar, and kettle-engine-<version>.jar. Besides, if the transformations you want to use as data sources rely on external libraries, then you have to copy the proper jar files from the Kettle libext directory into the Report Designer lib folder, just as you did with the janino.jar file in the recipe. For more information about Pentaho Reporting, just visit the following wiki website: http://wiki.pentaho.com/display/Reporting/Pentaho+Reporting+Community+Documentation Alternatively, you can get the book Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers (Packt Publishing) by Will Gorman. Configuring the Pentaho BI Server for running PDI jobs and transformations Configuring the Pentaho BI Server for running PDI jobs and transformations The Pentaho BI Server is a collection of software components that provide the architecture and infrastructure required to build business intelligence solutions. With the Pentaho BI Server, you are able to run reports, visualize dashboards, schedule tasks, and more. Among these tasks, there is the ability to run Kettle jobs and transformations. This recipe shows you the minor changes you might have to make in order to be able to run Kettle jobs and transformations. Getting ready In order to follow this recipe, you will need some experience with the Pentaho BI Server. For configuring the Pentaho BI server, you obviously need the software. You can download the latest version of the Pentaho BI Server from the following URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pentaho/files/Business%20Intelligence%20Server/ Make sure you download the distribution that matches your platform. If you intend to run jobs and transformations from a Kettle repository, then make sure you have the name of the repository and proper credentials (user and password). How to do it... Carry out the following steps: If you intend to run a transformation or a job from a file, skip to the How it works section. Edit the settings.xml file located in the biserver-cepentaho-solutionssystemkettle folder inside the Pentaho BI Server installation folder. In the repository.type tag, replace the default value files with rdbms. Provide the name of your Kettle repository and the user and password, as shown in the following example: <kettle-repository> <!-- The values within <properties> are passed directly to the Kettle Pentaho components. --> <!-- This is the location of the Kettle repositories.xml file, leave empty if the default is used: $HOME/.kettle/repositories.xml --> <repositories.xml.file></repositories.xml.file> <repository.type>rdbms</repository.type> <!-- The name of the repository to use --> <repository.name>pdirepo</repository.name> <!-- The name of the repository user --> <repository.userid>dev</repository.userid> <!-- The password --> <repository.password>1234</repository.password> </kettle-repository> Start the server. It will be ready to run jobs and transformations from your Kettle repository. How it works... If you want to run Kettle transformations and jobs, then the Pentaho BI server already includes the Kettle libraries. The server is ready to run both jobs and transformations from files. If you intend to use a repository, then you have to provide the repository settings. In order to do this, you just have to edit the settings.xml file, as you did in the recipe. There's more... To avoid any inconvenience, be sure that the version of the libraries included are the same or newer than the version of Kettle you are using. For instance, Pentaho BI Server 3.7 includes Kettle 4.1 libraries. If you are using a different version of the server, then you can verify the Kettle version by looking in the following folder: biserver-cetomcatwebappspentahoWEB-INFlib This folder is inside the server installation folder. You should look for files named kettlecore-TRUNK-SNAPSHOT .jar, kettle-db-TRUNK-SNAPSHOT.jar, and kettleengine-TRUNK-SNAPSHOT.jar. Unzip any of them and look for the META-INFMANIFEST.MF file. There, you will find the Kettle version. You will see a line like this: Implementation-Version: 4.1.0. There is even an easier way: In the Pentaho User Console (PUC), look for the option 2. Get Environment Information inside the Data Integration with Kettle folder of the BI Developer Examples solution; run it and you will get detailed information about the Kettle environment. For your information, the transformation that is run behind the scenes is GetPDIEnvironment.ktr located in the biservercepentaho-solutionsbi-developersetl folder.

  Getting Started with Citrix XenApp 6 Design and implement Citrix farms based on XenApp 6 with this book and eBook Introducing XenApp 6 The new Citrix XenApp 6 runs only on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2. Citrix rewrote the code completely for the Windows 64-bit platform. This job provided a great opportunity to optimize the code for performance and scalability (Citrix tested XenApp 6 farms with over 1,000 member servers and 100,000 concurrent sessions) and provided new features. Here are some of the highlights of the new XenApp 6: Citrix Delivery Services Console is the new single management console. Only one console is something all users wanted for years. The new management console has been completely redesigned. We still need a separate console to manage web interface servers and licensing. (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it.) Citrix Receiver: The new Citrix Receiver for Windows supports eight languages and provides support for new plugins including Single sign-On, WAN acceleration, App-V, and more. Also, there is a new receiver for Mac and mobile users. We can use this receiver on iPhone, iPad, Android, or Blackberry to access applications hosted on XenApp 6. Citrix Dazzle: Citrix called Dazzle the first self-service "storefront" for enterprise applications. Dazzle allows corporate employees 24x7 self-service access to the applications they need to work. End users now can subscribe to XenApp applications (including App-V packages) using Dazzle on PC or Mac. Active Directory Group Policy integration: Now, we can manage XenApp policies and configure XenApp servers and farm settings using Active Directory Group Policies (GPO). PowerShell Support: We can use Microsoft PowerShell to automate common XenApp management tasks. Citrix dropped support for MFCOM (the programming interface for the administration of XenApp servers and farms on previous versions) as the favorite option for developers and added PowerShell 2.0 support. Windows service isolation for streamed applications: This new feature allows applications to install Windows services and they can be profiled and streamed. This new option increases the number of streamed applications supported. Applications like Microsoft Office 2010 or Adobe Creative Suite install a windows service. Now we can profile and stream them, and other applications, using the new service isolation technology. Citrix HDX technologies: Provide better multimedia and high-definition experience with support for more USB devices than ever before. Citrix HDX offers great improvements in both audio and video quality. New video conference capabilities and advanced Adobe Flash support are included too. Also, HDX provides multi-monitor support, improving application compatibility when we use multiple monitors. Support for Windows portable USB devices: This feature allows our users to plug in their USB devices like cameras, scanners, and other devices and access them from their published applications on XenApp 6. The Role-based Setup Wizard simplifies server deployment and reduces installation time. The new redesigned setup makes installation simple, fast, and intuitive. Now we can install XenApp 6 in a few clicks. Also, by separating the installation from the configuration, we simplified XenApp deployments using Provisioning services or other image management solutions. Microsoft App-V integration allows us to manage and deliver both Citrix and Microsoft application delivery from a single point. Also, App-V managed applications can now be delivered via Citrix Dazzle. Administrators can now distribute App-V plugin to end-point devices using Citrix Receiver. Multi-lingual User Interface (MUI): XenApp now supports MUI. This feature allows multinational companies to deploy one XenApp server to serve users who need access to their applications in their local language. In addition to these major features and enhancements, XenApp 6 included other features like great Web Interface, Single Sign-on, and SmartAuditor enhancements, new 32-bit color support, Windows 7 smart card support, and so on. XenApp feature overview This section provides summary descriptions of some of the most popular XenApp features. This section will help new Citrix customers to understand major features on the last three versions of XenApp (XenApp 4.5, 5.0, 6.0). Access applications from any device, anytime, anywhere: We can deliver any published Windows application to an extensive variety of user devices and operating systems, including Windows, Mac, Linux, UNIX, DOS, Java, and mobile devices like iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, and Android devices. Active Directory Federation Services support: We can use ADFS to provide business partners access to published applications. Application gateway: Citrix provides SSL-proxy, using both hardware (Citrix NetScaler and Citrix Access Gateway) and software (Citrix Secure Gateway) solutions, to allow remote users to access published applications in XenApp, securely. CPU utilization management: This feature prevents users and their processes from utilizing the CPU too much and guarantees a consistent performance level for all users on the XenApp server. Installation Manager: This feature allows us to remotely install applications to multiple XenApp servers simultaneously. Network Management Console Integration: XenApp supports SNMP monitoring and integration with third-party network management tools, including Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView, CAUnicenter. Novell eDirectory and NDS Support: XenApp 6 provides support for Novell eDirectory and Domain Services for Windows, allowing XenApp to authenticate Novell users. Power and capacity management: We can create system policies to manage server power consumption. This feature can turn on/off XenApp servers. As users log off and idle resources increase, idle servers are shut down. When users arrive in the morning and they log on to the farm, servers are powered up. Also, we can schedule time for powering on and powering off servers. Single Sign-On: This feature (formerly known as Password Manager) provides single sign-on access to Windows, web, and terminal emulator applications. The self-service password reset feature included in single sign-on allows users to reset their domain password or unlock their Windows account. SmartAuditor: Uses policies to allow us to record the on-screen activity of any user's session, over any type of connection, from any server running XenApp. SmartAuditor records, catalogs, and archives sessions for review. Web interface: The web interface allows users access to published applications and content on XenApp through a standard web browser or Citrix Plug-in. Web interface provides built-in support for two-factor, RADIUS, and Smart Card authentication, simple customization through the management console and multilingual support, for the following languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese (simplified and traditional), and Korean.

Drupal 7 Fields/CCK Beginner's Guide Explore Drupal 7 fields/CCK and master their use Field display The purpose of managing the field display is not only to beautify the visual representation of fields but also to affect how people read the information on a web page and the usability of a website. The design of a field display has to seem logical to users and easy to understand. Consider an online application form where the first name field is positioned in between the state and country fields. Although the application can gather the information just fine, this would be very illogical and bothersome to our users. It goes without saying that the first name should be in the personal details section while the state and country should go in the personal address section of the form. Time for action – a first look at the field display settings In this section, we will learn where to find the field display settings in Drupal. Now, let's take a look at the field display settings: Click on the Structure link on the administration menu at the top of the page. Click on the Content types link on this page. On the right of the table, click on the manage display link to go to the manage display administration page to adjust the order and positioning of, the field labels. Click on the manage display link to adjust the field display for the Recipe content type. This page lists all of the field display settings that are related to the content type we selected. (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it.) If we click on the select list for any of the labels, there are three options that we can select, Above, Inline, and <Hidden>. If we click on the select list for any of the formats, there are five options that we can select from, namely, Default, Plain text, Trimmed, Summary or trimmed, and <Hidden>. However, the options will vary with field types. As in the case of the Difficulty field the multiple values field, if we click on the select list for Format, will show three options, Default, Key, and <Hidden>. What just happened? We have learned where to find the field display settings in Drupal, and we have taken a look at the options for the field display. When we click on the select list for labels, there are three options that we can use to control the display of the field label: Above: The label will be positioned above the field widget Inline: The label will be positioned to the left of the field widget <Hidden>:The label will not be displayed on the page When we click on the select list for formats, the options will be shown, but the options will be different, and depend on the field type we select. For the Body field, we will have four options that we can choose to control the body field display: Default: The field content will be displayed as we specified when we created the field Plain text: The field content will be displayed as plain text, which ignores HTML tags if the content contains any Trimmed: The field content will be truncated to a specified number of characters Summary or trimmed: The summary of the field will be displayed; if there is no summary entered, the content of the field will be trimmed to a specified number of characters <Hidden>:The field content will not be displayed Formatting field display in the Teaser view The teaser view of content is usually the first piece of information people will see on a homepage or a landing page, so it will be useful if there are options that could control the display in teaser view. For example, for the yummy recipe website, the client would like to have the number of characters displayed in teaser view limited to 300 characters, because they do not like to display too much text for each post on the homepage. Time for action – formatting the Body field display in teaser view In this section, we will format the Body field of the Recipe content type in teaser view: Click on the Structure link on the administration menu at the top of the page. Click on the Content types link on the following page: Click on the manage display link to adjust the field display for the Recipe content type. At the top-right of the page, there are two buttons, the first one is Default, the second one is Teaser, now click on the Teaser button. (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it.) This page lists all the available fields for the teaser view of the Recipe content type. (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it.) Now click on the gear icon to update the trim length settings: (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it.) After clicking on the gear icon, which will display the Trim length settings. The default value of Trim length is 600, we change it to 300, and then click on the Update button to confirm the entered value. Click on the Save button at the bottom of the page to store the value into Drupal. If we go back to the homepage, we will see the recipe content in teaser view. It is now truncated to 300 characters. What just happened? We have formatted the Body field of the Recipe content type in Teaser view. Currently there are two view modes, one is the Default view mode, and the other is the Teaser view mode. When we need to format the field content in Teaser view, we have to switch to the Teaser view mode on the Manage display. administration page to modify these settings. Moreover, when entering data or updating the field display settings, we have to remember to click on the Save button at the bottom of the page to permanently store the value into Drupal. If we just click on the Update button, it will not store the value into Drupal, it will only confirm the value we entered, therefore, we always need to remember to click on the Save button after updating any settings. Furthermore, there are other fields which are positioned in the hidden section at the bottom of the page, which means those fields will not be shown in Teaser view. In our case only the Body field is shown in Teaser view. We can easily drag and drop a field to the hidden section to hide the field, or drag and drop a field above the hidden section to show the field on the screen.

  Excel 2010 Financials Cookbook Powerful techniques for financial organization, analysis, and presentation in Microsoft Excel         Read more about this book       (For more resources on this subject, see here.) Calculating the depreciation of assets Assets within a business are extremely important for a number of reasons. Assets can become investments for growth or investments in another line of business. Assets can also take on many forms such as computer equipment, vehicles, furniture, buildings, land, and so on. Assets are not only important within the business for which they are used, but they are also used as a method of reducing the tax burden on a business. As a financial manager, you are tasked with calculating the depreciation expense for a laptop computer with a useful life of five years. In this recipe, you will learn to calculate the depreciation of an asset over the life of the asset. Getting ready There are several different methods of depreciation. A business may use straight-line depreciation, declining depreciation, double-declining depreciation, or a variation of these methods. Excel has the functionality to calculate each of the methods with a slight variation to the function; however, in this recipe, we will use a straight-line depreciation. Straight-line depreciation provides equal reduction of an asset over its life. Getting ready We will first need to set up the Excel worksheet to hold the depreciation values for the laptop computer: In cell A5 list Year and in cell B5 list 1. This will account for the depreciation for the year that the asset was purchased. Continue this list until all five years are listed: In cell B2, list the purchase price of the Laptop computer; the purchase price is $2500: In cell B4, we will need to enter the salvage value of the asset. The salvage value will be the estimated resale value of the asset when it is useful life, as determined by generally accepted accounting principles, has elapsed. Enter $500 in cell B3: In cell B5 enter the formula =SLN($B$2,$B$3,5) and press Enter: Copy the formula from cell C5 and paste it through cell C9: Excel now has listed the straight-line depreciation expense for each of the five years. As you can see in this schedule, the depreciation expense remains consistent through each year of the asset's useful life. How it works... Straight-line depreciation calculates the value of the purchase price minus the salvage price, and divides the remainder across the useful life. The function accepts inputs as follows =SLN(purchase price, salvage price, useful life). There's more... Other depreciation methods are as follows: Calculating the future versus current value of your money When working within finance, accounting, or general business it is important to know how much money you have. However, knowing how much money you have now is only a portion of the whole financial picture. You must also know how much your money will be worth in the future. Knowing future value allows you to know truly how much your money is worth, and with this knowledge, you can decide what you need to do with it. As a financial manager, you must provide feedback on whether to introduce a new product line. As with any new venture, there will be several related costs including start-up costs, operational costs, and more. Initially, you must spend $20,000 to account for most start-up costs and you will potentially, for the sake of the example, earn a profit of $5500 for five years. You also know due to expenditures, you expect your cost of capital to be 10%. In this recipe, you will learn to use Excel functions to calculate the future value of the venture and whether this proves to be profitable. How to do it... We will first need to enter all known values and variables into the worksheet: In cell B2, enter the initial cost of the business venture: In cell B3, enter the discount rate, or the cost of capital of 10%: In cells B4 through B8, enter the five years' worth of expected net profit from the business venture: In cell B10, we will calculate the net present value: Enter the formula =NPV(B3,B4:B8) and press Enter We now see that accounting for future inflows, the net present value of the business venture is $20,849.33. Our last step is to account for the initial start-up costs and determine the overall profitability. In cell B11, enter the formula =B10/B2 and press Enter: As a financial manager, we now see that for every $1 invested in this venture, you will receive $1.04 in present value inflows. How it works... NPV or net present value is calculated in Excel using all of the inflow information that was entered across the estimated period. For the five years used in this recipe, the venture shows a profit of $5500 for each year. This number cannot be used directly, because there is a cost of making money. The cost in this instance pertains to taxes and other expenditures. In the NPV formula, we did not include the initial cost of start-up because this cost is exempt from the cost of capital; however, it must be used at the end of the formula to account for the outflow compared to the inflows. There's more... The $1.04 value calculated at the end of this recipe is also known as the profitability index. When this index is greater than one, the venture is said to be a positive investment.

CryENGINE 3 Cookbook Over 90 recipes written by Crytek developers for creating third-generation real-time games Low gravity In this simple recipe, we will look at utilizing the GravityBox to set up a low gravity area within a level. Getting ready Have Sandbox open Then open My_Level.cry How to do it... To start, first we must place down a GravityBox. In the RollupBar, click on the Entities button. Under the Physics section, select GravityBox. Place the GravityBox on the ground: Keeping the default dimensions (20, 20, 20 meters), the only property here that we want to change is the gravity. The default settings in this box set this entire area within the level to be a zero gravity zone. To adjust the up/down gravity of this, we need to change the value of gravity and the Z axis. To mimic normal gravity, this value would need to be set to the acceleration value of -9.81. To change this value to a lower gravity value, (something like the Moon's gravity) simply change it to a higher negative value such as -1.62. How it works... The GravityBox is a simple bounding box which overrides the defined gravity in the code (-9.81) and sets its own gravity value within the bounding box. Anything physicalized and activated to receive physics updates will behave within the confines of these gravitational rules unless they fall outside of the bounding box. There's more... Here are some useful tips about the gravity objects. Uniform property The uniform property within the GravityBox defines whether the GravityBox should use its own local orientation or the world's. If true, the GravityBox will use its own local rotation for the gravitational direction. If false, it will use the world's direction. This is used when you wish to have the gravity directed sideways. Set this value to True and then rotate the GravityBox onto its side. Gravity sphere Much like the GravityBox, the GravitySphere holds all the same principles but in a radius instead of a bounding box. The only other difference with the GravitySphere is that a false uniform Boolean will cause any object within the sphere to be attracted/repulsed from the center of the axis.   Hangman on a rope In this recipe, we will look at how we can utilize a rope to hang a dead body from it. Getting ready Open Sandbox Then open My_Level.cry How to do it... Begin by drawing out a rope: Open the RollupBar. From the Misc button, select Rope. With Grid Snap on and set to 1 meter, draw out a straight rope that has increments of one meter (by clicking once for every increment) up to four meters (double-click to finalize the rope). Align the rope so that from end to end it is along the Z axis (up and down) and a few meters off the ground: Next, we will need something solid to hang the rope from. Place down a solid with 1, 1, 1 meter. Align the rope underneath the solid cube while keeping both off the ground. Make sure when aligning the rope to get the end constraint to turn from red to green. This means it is attached to a physical surface: Lastly, we will need to hang a body from this rope. However, we will not hang him in the traditional manner, but rather by one of his feet. In the RollupBar, click on the Entities button. Under the Physics section, select DeadBody. Rotate this body up-side-down and align one of his feet to the bottom end of the rope. Select the rope to make sure the bottom constraint turns green to signal that it is attached. Verify that the Hangman on a rope recipe works by going into game mode and punching the dead body: How it works... The rope is a complicated cylinder that can contain as many bending segments as defined and is allowed to stretch and compress depending on the values defined. Tension and breaking strength can also be defined. But since ropes have expensive physics properties involved, they should be used sparingly.  

What is GoldenGate? Oracle GoldenGate is Oracle's strategic solution for real-time data integration. GoldenGate software enables mission-critical systems to have continuous availability and access to real-time data. It offers a fast and robust solution for replicating transactional data between operational and analytical systems. Oracle GoldenGate captures, filters, routes, verifies, transforms, and delivers transactional data in real-time, across Oracle and heterogeneous environments with very low impact and preserved transaction integrity. The transaction data management provides read consistency, maintaining referential integrity between source and target systems. As a competitor to Oracle GoldenGate, data replication products, and solutions exist from other software companies and vendors. These are mainly storage replication solutions that provide a fast point in time data restoration. The following is a list of the most common solutions available today: EMC SRDF and EMC RecoverPoint IBM PPRC and Global Mirror (known together as IBM Copy Services) Hitachi TrueCopy Hewlett-Packard Continuous Access (HP CA) Symantec Veritas Volume Replicator (VVR) DataCore SANsymphony and SANmelody FalconStor Replication and Mirroring Compellent Remote Instant Replay Data replication techniques have improved enormously over the past 10 years and have always been a requirement in nearly every IT project in every industry. Whether for Disaster Recovery (DR), High Availability (HA), Business Intelligence (BI), or even regulatory reasons, the requirements and expected performance have also increased, making the implementation of efficient and scalable data replication solutions a welcome challenge. Oracle GoldenGate evolution GoldenGate Software Inc was founded in 1995. Originating in San Francisco, the company was named after the famous Golden Gate Bridge by its founders, Eric Fish and Todd Davidson. The tried and tested product that emerged quickly became very popular within the financial industry. Originally designed for the fault tolerant Tandem computers, the resilient and fast data replication solution was in demand. The banks initially used GoldenGate software in their ATM networks for sending transactional data from high street machines to mainframe central computers. The data integrity and guaranteed zero data loss is obviously paramount and plays a key factor. The key architectural properties of the product are as follows: Data is sent in "real time" with sub-second speed. Supports heterogeneous environments across different database and hardware types. "Transaction aware" —maintaining its read-consistent and referential integrity between source and target systems. High performance with low impact; able to move large volumes of data very efficiently while maintaining very low lag times and latency. Flexible modular architecture. Reliable and extremely resilient to failure and data loss. No single point of failure or dependencies, and easy to recover. Oracle Corporation acquired GoldenGate Software in September 2009. Today there are more than 500 customers around the world using GoldenGate technology for over 4000 solutions, realizing over $100 million in revenue for Oracle. Oracle GoldenGate solutions Oracle GoldenGate provides five data replication solutions: High Availability Live Standby for an immediate fail-over solution that can later re-synchronize with your primary source. Active-Active solutions for continuous availability and transaction load distribution between two or more active systems. Zero-Downtime Upgrades and Migrations Eliminates downtime for upgrades and migrations. Live Reporting Feeding a reporting database so as not to burden the source production systems with BI users or tools. Operational Business Intelligence (BI) Real-time data feeds to operational data stores or data warehouses, directly or via Extract Transform and Load (ETL) tools. Transactional Data Integration Real-time data feeds to messaging systems for business activity monitoring, business process monitoring, and complex event processing. Uses event-driven architecture and service-oriented architecture (SOA). The following diagram shows the basic architecture for the various solutions available from GoldenGate software: We have discovered there are many solutions where GoldenGate can be applied. Now we can dive into how GoldenGate works, the individual processes, and the data flow that is adopted for all. Oracle GoldenGate technology overview Let's take a look at GoldenGate's fundamental building blocks; the Capture process, Trail files, Data pump, Server collector, and Apply processes. In fact, the order in which the processes are listed depicts the sequence of events for GoldenGate data replication across distributed systems. A Manager process runs on both the source and the target systems that "oversee" the processing and transmission of data. All the individual processes are modular and can be easily decoupled or combined to provide the best solution to meet the business requirements. It is normal practice to configure multiple Capture and Apply processes to balance the load and enhance performance. Filtering and transformation of the data can be done at either the source by the Capture or at the target by the Apply processes. This is achieved through parameter files. The capture process (Extract) Oracle GoldenGate's capture process, known as Extract, obtains the necessary data from the databases' transaction logs. For Oracle, these are the online redo logs that contain all the data changes made in the database. GoldenGate does not require access to the source database and only extracts the committed transactions from the online redo logs. It can, however, read archived redo logs to extract the data from long-running transactions. The Extract process will regularly checkpoint its read and write position, typically to a file. The checkpoint data insures GoldenGate can recover its processes without data loss in the case of failure. The Extract process can have one of the following statuses: STOPPED STARTING RUNNING ABENDED The ABENDED status stems back to the Tandem computer, where processes either stop (end normally) or abend (end abnormally). Abend is short for an abnormal end. Trail files To replicate transactional data efficiently from one database to another, Oracle GoldenGate converts the captured data into a Canonical Format which is written to trail files, both on the source and the target system. The provision of the source and target trail files in the GoldenGates architecture eliminates any single point of failure and ensures data integrity is maintained. A dedicated checkpoint process keeps track of the data being written to the trails on both the source and target for fault tolerance. It is possible to configure GoldenGate not to use trail files on the source system and write data directly from the database's redo logs to the target server data collector. In this case, the Extract process sends data in large blocks across a TCP/IP network to the target system. However, this configuration is not recommended due to the possibility of data loss occurring during unplanned system or network outages. Best practice states, the use of local trail files would provide a history of transactions and support the recovery of data for retransmission via a Data Pump. Data pump When using trail files on the source system, known as a local trail, GoldenGate requires an additional Extract process called Data pump that sends data in large blocks across a TCP/IP network to the target system. As previously stated, this is best practice and should be adopted for all Extract configurations. Server collector The server collector process runs on the target system and accepts data from the source (Extract/Data Pump). Its job is to reassemble the data and write it to a GoldenGate trail file, known as a remote trail. The Apply process (Replicat) The Apply process, known in GoldenGate as Replicat, is the final step in the data delivery. It reads the trail file and applies it to the target database in the form of DML (deletes, updates, and inserts) or DDL*. (database structural changes). This can be concurrent with the data capture or performed later. The Replicat process will regularly checkpoint its read and write position, typically to a file. The checkpoint data ensures that GoldenGate can recover its processes without data loss in the case of failure. The Replicat process can have one of the following statuses: STOPPED STARTING RUNNING ABENDED * DDL is only supported in unidirectional configurations and non-heterogeneous (Oracle to Oracle) environments. The Manager process The Manager process runs on both source and target systems. Its job is to control activities such as starting, monitoring, and restarting processes; allocating data storage; and reporting errors and events. The Manager process must exist in any GoldenGate implementation. However, there can be only one Manager process per Changed Data Capture configuration on the source and target. The Manager process can have either of the following statuses: STOPPED RUNNING GGSCI In addition to the processes previously described, Oracle GoldenGate 10.4 ships with its own command line interface known as GoldenGate Software Command Interface (GGSCI). This tool provides the administrator with a comprehensive set of commands to create, configure, and monitor all GoldenGate processes. Oracle GoldenGate 10.4 is command-line driven. However, there is a product called Oracle GoldenGate Director that provides a GUI for configuration and management of your GoldenGate environment. Process data flow The following diagram illustrates the GoldenGate processes and their dependencies. The arrows largely depict replicated data flow (committed transactions), apart from checkpoint data and configuration data. The Extract and Replicat processes periodically checkpoint to a file for persistence. The parameter file provides the configuration data. As described in the previous paragraphs, two options exist for sending data from source to target; these are shown as broken arrows: Having discovered all the processes required for GoldenGate to replicate data, let's now dive a little deeper into the architecture and configurations.

Drupal 7 Fields/CCK Beginner's Guide Explore Drupal 7 fields/CCK and master their use Adding image fields to content types We have learned how to add file fields to content types. In this section, we will learn how to add image fields to content types so that we can attach images to our content. Time for action – adding an image field to the Recipe content type In this section, we will add an image field to the Recipe content type. Follow these steps: Click on the Structure link in the administration menu at the top of the page. Click on the Content types link to go to the content types administration page. Click on the manage fields link on the Recipe row as in the following screenshot, because we would like to add an image field to the recipe content type. (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it.) Locate the Add new field section. In the Label field enter "Image", and in the Field name field enter "image". In the field type select list, select "image" as the field type; the field widget will be automatically switched to select Image as the field widget. After the values are entered, click on Save. (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it.)   What just happened?   We added an image field to the Recipe content type. The process of adding an image field to the Recipe content type is similar to the process of adding a file field to the Recipe content type, except that we selected image field as the field type and we selected image as the field widget. We will configure the image field in the next section. Configuring image field settings We have already added the image field. In this section, we will configure the image field, learn how to configure the image field settings, and understand how they reflect to image outputs by using those settings. Time for action – configuring an image field for the Recipe content type In this section, we will configure image field settings in the Recipe content type. Follow these steps: After clicking on the Save button, Drupal will direct us to the next page, which provides the field settings for the image field. The Upload destination option is the same as the file field settings, which provide us an option to decide whether image files should be public or private. In our case, we select Public files. The last option is the Default image field. We will leave this option for now, and click on the Save field settings button to go to the next step. (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it.) This page contains all the settings for the image field. The most common field settings are the Label field, the Required field, and the Help text field. We will leave these fields as default. (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it.) The Allowed file extension section is similar to the file field we have already learned about. We will use the default value in this field, so we don't need to enter anything for this field. The File directory section is also the same as the settings in the file field. Enter "image_files" in this field. (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it.) Enter "640" x "480" in the Maximum image resolution field and the Minimum image resolution field, and enter "2MB" in the maximum upload size field. (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it.) Check the Enable Alt field and the Enable Title field checkboxes. (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it.) Select thumbnail in the Preview image style select list, and select Throbber in the Progress indicator section. (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it.) The bottom part of this page, the image field settings section, is the same as the previous page we just saved, so we don't need to re-enter the values. Click on the Save settings button at the bottom of the page to store all the values we entered on this page. (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it.) After clicking on the Save settings button, Drupal sends us back to the Manage fields setting administration page. Now the image field is added to the Recipe content type. (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it.)   What just happened?   We have added and configured an image field for the Recipe content type. We left the default values in the Label field, the Required field, and the Help text field. They are the most common settings in fields. The Allowed file extension section is similar to the file field that we have seen, which provides us with the ability to enter the file extension of the images which are allowed to be uploaded. The File directory field is the same as the one in the file field, which provides us with the option to save the uploaded files to a different directory to the default location of the file directory. The Maximum image resolution field allows us to specify the maximum width and height of image resolution that will be uploaded. If the uploaded image is bigger than the resolution we specified, it will resize images to the size we specified. If we did not specify the size, it will not have any restriction to images. The Minimum image resolution field is the opposite of the maximum image resolution. We specify the minimum width and height of image resolution that is allowed to be uploaded, not the maximum width and height of image resolution. If we upload image resolution less than the minimum size we specified, it will throw an error message and reject the image upload. The Enable Alt field and the Enable Title field can be enabled to allow site administrators to enter the ALT and Title attributes of the img tag in XHTML, which can improve the accessibility and usability of a website when using images. The Preview image style select list allows us to select which image style will be used to display while editing content. Currently it provides three image styles, thumbnail, medium, and large. The thumbnail image style will be used by default. We will learn how to create a custom image style in the next section. Have a go hero – adding an image field to the Cooking Tip content type It's time for another challenge. We have created an image field to the Recipe content type. We can use the same method we have learned here to add and configure an image field to the Cooking Tip content type. You can apply the same steps used to create image fields to the Recipe content type and try to understand the differences between the settings on the image field settings administration page.

  Our Latest Books on Flash:   HTML5 Multimedia Development CookbookRecipes for practical, real-world HTML5 multimedia driven development.      Flash Development for Android CookbookOver 90 recipes to build exciting Android applications with Flash, Flex, and AIR      Flash Game Development by ExampleBuild 10 classic Flash games and learn game development along the way.     Flash with DrupalBuild dynamic, content-rich Flash CS3 and CS4 applications for Drupal 6.     Flash 10 Multiplayer Game EssentialsCreate exciting real-time multiplayer games using Flash.     Flash Multiplayer Virtual WorldsBuild immersive, full-featured interactive worlds for games, online communities, and more.     Facebook Graph API Development with FlashBuild social Flash applications fully integrated with the Facebook Graph API.     Papervision3D EssentialsCreate interactive Papervision 3D applications with stunning effects and powerful animations.      WordPress and Flash 10x CookbookOver 50 simple but incredibly effective recipes to take control of dynamic Flash content in Wordpress.     Away3D 3.6 CookbookOver 80 practical recipes for creating stunning graphics and effects with the fascinating Away3D engine.     Joomla! with FlashBuild a stunning, content-rich, and interactive web site with Joomla! 1.5 and Flash CS4.               Forthcoming Books on Flash:   Flash Facebook CookbookOver 100 recipes for integrating the Flash Platform applications with the Graph API and Facebook.     Flash iOS Apps Cookbook: RAWOver 100 practical recipes for developing iOS apps with Flash Professional and Adobe AIR.  Articles: Flash Development for Android: Audio Input via Microphone Flash Game Development: Making of Astro-PANIC! Flash 10 Multiplayer Game: Game Interface Design Adding Flash to your WordPress Theme Customizing an Avatar in Flash Multiplayer Virtual Worlds