How-To Tutorials

  Alfresco 3 Business Solutions Practical implementation techniques and guidance for delivering business solutions with Alfresco Deep practical insights into the vast possibilities that exist with the Alfresco platform for designing business solutions. Each and every type of business solution is implemented through the eyes of a fictitious financial organization - giving you the right amount of practical exposure you need. Packed with numerous case studies which will enable you to learn in various real world scenarios. Learn to use Alfresco's rich API arsenal with ease. Extend Alfresco's functionality and integrate it with external systems. Planning document migration Now we have got a strategy for how to do the document migration and we have several import methods to choose from, but we have not yet thought about planning the document migration. The end users will need time to select and organize the files they want to migrate and we might need some time to write temporary import scripts. So we need to plan this well ahead of production day. The end users will have to go through all their documents and decide which ones they want to keep and which ones they will no longer need. Sometimes the decision to keep a document is not up to the end user but instead might be controlled by regulations, so this requires extra research The following screenshot shows the Best Money schedule for document migration: It is not only electronic files that might need to be imported, sometimes there are paper-based files that need to be scanned and imported. This needs to be planned into the schedule too. Implementing document migration So we have a document migration strategy and we have a plan. Now let's see a couple of examples of how we can implement document migration in practice. Using Alfresco bulk filesystem import tool A tool such as the Alfresco bulk filesystem import tool is probably what most people will use and it is also the preferred import tool in the Best Money project. So let's start looking at how this tool is used. It is delivered in an AMP and is installed by dropping the AMP into the ALFRESCO_HOME/amps directory and restarting Alfresco. However, we prefer to install it manually with the Module Management Tool (MMT) as we have other AMPs, such as the Best Money AMP, that have been installed with the MMT tool. Copy the alfresco-bulk-filesystem-import-0.8.amp (or newest version) file into the ALFRESCO_HOME/bin directory. Stop Alfresco and then install the AMP as follows: C:Alfresco3.3bin>java -jar alfresco-mmt.jar install alfresco- bulkfilesystem-import-0.8.amp C:Alfresco3.3tomcatwebapps alfresco.war-verbose Running Alfresco bulk import tool Remove the ALFRESCO_HOME/tomcat/webapps/alfresco directory, so the files contained in the new AMP are recognized when the updated WAR file is exploded on restart of Alfresco. The tool provides a UI form in Alfresco Explorer that makes it very simple to do the import. It can be accessed via the http://localhost:8080/alfresco/service/bulk/import/filesystem URL, which will display the following form (you will be prompted to log in first, so make sure to log in with a user that has access to the spaces where you want to upload the content): Here, the Import directory field is mandatory and specifies the absolute path to the filesystem directory from where to load the documents and folders from. It should be specified in an OS-specific format such as for example C:docmigrationmeetings or /docmigration/meetings. Note that this directory must be locally accessible to the server where the Alfresco instance is running. It must either be a local filesystem or a locally mounted remote filesystem. The Target space field is also mandatory and specifies the target space/folder to load the documents and folders into. It is specified as a path starting with /Company Home. The separator character is Unix-style (that is, "/"), regardless of the platform Alfresco is running on. This field includes an AJAX auto-suggest feature, so you may type any part of the target space name, and an AJAX search will be performed to find and display matching items. The Update existing files checkbox field specifies whether to update files that already exist in the repository (checked) or skip them (unchecked). The import is started by clicking on the Initiate Bulk Import button. Once an import has been initiated, a status Web Script will display that reports on the status of the background import process. This Web Script automatically refreshes every 10 seconds until the import process completes. For the Best Money project, we have set up a staging area for the document migration where users can add documents to be imported into Alfresco. Let's import the Meetings folder, which looks as follows, in the staging area: One Committee meeting has been added and that is what we will test to import with the tool. Fill out the Bulk Import form as follows Click Initiate Bulk Import button to start the import. The form should show the progress of the import and when finished we should see something like this: In this case, the import took 9.5 seconds and 31 documents (totaling 28 MB) were imported and five folders created. If we look at the document nodes, we will see that they all have the bmc:document type applied and the bmc:documentData aspect applied. This is accomplished by a type rule which is added to the Meetings folder. All documents also have the cm:versionable aspect applied via the "Apply Versioning" rule, which is added to the Meetings folder.

Getting Started with IBM FileNet P8 Content Manager Install, customize, and administer the powerful FileNet Enterprise Content Management platform Quickly get up to speed on all significant features and the major components of IBM FileNet P8 Content Manager Provides technical details that are valuable both for beginners and experienced Content Management professionals alike, without repeating product reference documentation Gives a big picture description of Enterprise Content Management and related IT areas to set the context for Content Manager Written by an IBM employee, Bill Carpenter, who has extensive experience in Content Manager product development, this book gives practical tips and notes with a step-by-step approach to design real Enterprise Content Management solutions to solve your business needs Parts of some of these topics will cover things that are features of the XT application rather than general features of CM and the P8 platform. We'll point those out so there is no confusion. What is Workplace XT? IBM provides complete, comprehensive APIs for writing applications to work with the CM product and the P8 platform. They also provide several pre-built, ready to use environments for working with CM. These range from connectors and other integrations, to IBM and third-party applications, to standalone applications provided with CM. Business needs will dictate which of these will be used. It is common for a given enterprise to use a mix of custom coding, product integrations, and standalone CM applications. Even in cases where the standalone CM applications are not widely deployed throughout the enterprise, they can still be used for ad hoc exploration or troubleshooting by administrators or power users. XT is a complete, standalone application included with CM. It's a good application for human-centered document management, where users in various roles actively participate in the creation and management of individual items. XT exposes most CM features, including the marriage of content management and process management (workflow). XT is a thin client web application built with modern user interface technologies so that it has something of a Web 2.0 look and feel. To run XT, open its start page with your web browser. The URL is the server name where XT is installed, the appropriate port number, and the default context of WorkplaceXT. In our installation, that's http://wjc-rhel.example.net:9080/WorkplaceXT. We don't show it here, but for cases where XT is in wider use than our all-in-one development system, it's common to configure things so that it shows up on port 80, the default HTTP port. This can be done by reconfiguring the application server to use those ports directly or by interposing a web server (for example, IBM HTTP Server, IHS) as a relay between the browser clients and the application server. It's also common to configure things such that at least the login page is protected by TLS/SSL. Details for both of these configuration items are covered in depth in the product documentation (they vary by application server type). For some of the examples in this article, we'll log on as the high-privileged user poweruser, and, for others, we'll log on as the low-privileged user unpriv. You can create them now or substitute any pair of non-administrator accounts from your own directory. Browsing folders and documents Let's have a look at XT's opening screen. Log onto XT as user poweruser. With the folder icon selected from the top-left group of four icons, as in the figure below, XT shows a tree view that allows browsing through folders for content. Of course, we don't actually have any content in the Object Store yet, so all we see when we expand the Object Store One node are pseudo-folders (that is, things XT puts into the tree but which are not really folders in the Object Store). Let's add some content right now. For now, we'll concentrate on the user view of things. Adding folders In the icon bar are two icons with small, green "+" signs on them (you can see them in the screenshot above). The left icon, which looks like a piece of paper, is for adding documents to the currently expanded folder. The icon to the right of that, which looks like an office supply folder, is for adding a subfolder to the currently expanded folder. Select Object Store One in the tree view, and click the icon for adding a folder. The first panel of a pop-up wizard appears, as shown above, prompting you for a folder name. We have chosen the name literature to continue the example that we started in Administrative Tools and Tasks. Click the Add button, and the folder will be created and will appear in the tree view. Follow the same procedure to add a subfolder to that called shakespeare. That is, create a folder whose path is /literature/shakespeare. You can modify the security of most objects by right-clicking and selecting More Information | Security. A pop-up panel shows the object's Access Control List (ACL). For now, we just want to allow other users to add items to the shakespeare folder (we'll need that for the illustration of entry templates when we get to that section below). Open that folder's security panel. Click the link for #AUTHENTICATEDUSERS, and check the File In Folder box in the Allow column, highlighted in the following screenshot: Adding documents Now let's add some actual documents to our repository. We'll add a few of Shakespeare's famous works as sample documents. There are many sources for electronic copies of Shakespeare's works readily available on the Internet. One of our favorites for exercises like this is at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: http://shakespeare.mit.edu. It's handy because it's really just the text without a lot of notes, criticisms, and so on. The first thing you see is a list of all the works categorized by type of work, and you're only a click or two away from the full HTML text of the work. It doesn't hurt that they explicitly state that they have placed the HTML versions in the public domain. We'll use the full versions in a single HTML page for our sample documents. In some convenient place on your desktop machine, download a few of the full text files. We chose As You Like It (asyoulikeit_full.html), Henry V (henryv_full.html), Othello (othello_full.html), and Venus and Adonis (VenusAndAdonis.html). Select the /literature/shakespeare folder in the tree view, and click the icon for adding a document. The document add wizard pops up, as shown next: Browse to the location of the first document file, asyoulikeit_full.html, and click the Next button. Don't click Add Now or you won't get the correct document class for our example. Initially, the class Document is indicated. Click on Class and select Work of Literature. The list of properties automatically adjusts to reflect the custom properties defined for our custom class. Supply the values indicated (note in particular that you have to adjust the Document Title property because it defaults to the file name). XT uses the usual convention of marking required properties with an asterisk. Click Add. Repeat the above steps for the other three documents. You'll now have a short list in the shakespeare folder. XT also provides a "landing zone" for the drag-and-drop of documents. It's located in the upper right-hand corner of the browser window, as shown next. This can save you the trouble of browsing for documents in your filesystem. Even though it can accept multiple documents in a single drag-and-drop, it prompts only for a single set of property values that are applied to all of the documents. Viewing documents Clicking on a document link in XT will lead to the download of the content and the launching of a suitable application. For most documents, the web browser is used to find and launch an application based on the document content type, although XT does have some configurability in its site preferences for customizing that behavior. The behavior you can normally expect is the same as if you clicked on a link for a document on any typical website. For graphical image content (JPEG, PNG, and similar formats), XT launches the Image Viewer applet. The Image Viewer applet is especially handy for dealing with Tagged Image Format Files (TIFF) graphics because most browsers do not handle TIFF natively. It is common for fax and scanning applications to generate TIFF images of pages. However, even for common graphics formats that can be rendered by the browser, the Image Viewer applet has more functionality. The most interesting extra features are for adding textual or graphical annotations to the image. Rather than directly manipulating the original image, the annotations are created in an overlay layer and saved as Annotation objects in the repository. For example, in the image below, being displayed in the Image Viewer applet, the stamp tool has been used to mark it as a DRAFT. That annotation can easily be repositioned or even removed without affecting the original image. The included Image Viewer applet is licensed only for use within the FileNet components where it's already integrated. It is an OEM version of ViewONE from Daeja Image Systems. The ViewONE Pro application, which has additional functionality, is available for license directly from Daeja and can be integrated into FileNet applications as a supported configuration. However, in such cases, support for the viewer itself comes directly from Daeja. Entry templates Although each step of document and folder creation is individually straightforward, taken together they can become bewildering to non-technical users, especially if coupled with naming, security, and other conventions. Even when the process is completely understood, there are several details which are purely clerical in nature but which still might suffer from mis-typing and so on. From these motivations comes an XT feature called Entry Templates. Someone, usually an administrator, creates an entry template as an aid for other users who are creating folders or documents. A great many details can be specified in advance, but the user can still be given choices at appropriate points. To create an entry template, navigate to Tools | Advanced Tools | Entry Templates | Add. A wizard is launched from which you can define a Document Entry Template or a Folder Entry Template. We won't go through all of the steps here since the user interface is easy to understand. Both types of entry templates are Document subclasses, and XT files created entry templates into folders. When you double-click on an entry template, XT presents a user interface that adheres to the entry template design. For example, in this screen shot which uses an entry template called Shakespearean Document, the document class and target folder are already selected and cannot be changed by the user. Likewise, the author last and full names are pre-populated. Other properties, which genuinely need user input, can be edited as usual.

  Tcl/Tk 8.5 Programming Cookbook Over 100 great recipes to effectively learn Tcl/Tk 8.5 The quickest way to solve your problems with Tcl/Tk 8.5 Understand the basics and fundamentals of the Tcl/Tk 8.5 programming language Learn graphical User Interface development with the Tcl/Tk 8.5 Widget set Get a thorough and detailed understanding of the concepts with a real-world address book application Each recipe is a carefully organized sequence of instructions to efficiently learn the features and capabilities of the Tcl/Tk 8.5 language      Introduction So, you've installed Tcl, written some scripts, and now you're ready to get a deeper understanding of Tcl and all that it has to offer. So, why are we starting with the shell when it is the most basic tool in the Tcl toolbox? When I started using Tcl I needed to rapidly deliver a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to display a video from the IP-based network cameras. The solution had to run on Windows and Linux and it could not be browser-based due to the end user's security concerns. The client needed it quickly and our sales team had, as usual, committed to a delivery date without speaking to the developer in advance. So, with the requirement document in hand, I researched the open source tools available at the time and Tcl/Tk was the only language that met the challenge. The original solution quickly evolved into a full-featured IP Video Security system with the ability to record and display historic video as well as providing the ability to attach to live video feeds from the cameras. Next search capabilities were added to review the stored video and a method to navigate to specific dates and times. The final version included configuring advanced recording settings such as resolution, color levels, frame rate, and variable speed playback. All was accomplished with Tcl. Due to the time constraints, I was not able get a full appreciation of the capabilities of the shell. I saw it as a basic tool to interact with the interpreter to run commands and access the file system. When I had the time, I returned to the shell and realized just how valuable a tool it is and the many capabilities I had failed to make use of. When used to its fullest, the shell provides much more that an interface to the Tcl interpreter, especially in the early stages of the development process. Need to isolate and test a procedure in a program? Need a quick debugging tool? Need real-time notification of the values stored in a variable? The Tcl shell is the place to go. Since then, I have learned countless uses for the shell that would not only have sped up the development process, but also saved me several headaches in debugging the GUI and video collection. I relied on numerous dialog boxes to pop up values or turned to writing debugging information to error logs. While this was an excellent way to get what I needed, I could have minimized the overhead in terms of coding by simply relying on the shell to display the desired information in the early stages. While dialog windows and error logs are irreplaceable, I now add in quick debugging by using the commands the shell has to offer. If something isn't proceeding as expected, I drop in a command to write to standard out and voila! I have my answer. The shell continues to provide me with a reliable method to isolate issues with a minimum investment of time. The Tcl shell The Tcl Shell (Tclsh) provides an interface to the Tcl interpreter that accepts commands from both standard input and text files. Much like the Windows Command Line or Linux Terminal, the Tcl shell allows a developer to rapidly invoke a command and observe the return value or error messages in standard output. The shell differs based on the Operating System in use. For the Unix/Linux systems, this is the standard terminal console; while on a Windows system, the shell is launched separately via an executable. If invoked with no arguments, the shell interface runs interactively, accepting commands from the native command line. The input line is demarked with a percent sign (%) with the prompt located at the start position. If the shell is invoked from the command line (Windows DOS or Unix/Linux terminal) and arguments are passed, the interpreter will accept the first as the filename to be read. Any additional arguments are processed as variables. The shell will run until the exit command is invoked or until it has reached the end of the text file. When invoked with arguments, the shell sets several Tcl variables that may be accessed within your program, much like the C family of languages. These variables are: VariableExplanationargcThis variable contains the number of arguments passed in with the exception of the script file name. A value of 0 is returned if no arguments were passed in.argvThis variable contains a Tcl List with elements detailing the arguments passed in. An empty string is returned if no arguments were provided.argv0This variable contains the filename (if specified) or the name used to invoke the Tcl shell.TCL_interactiveThis variable contains a '1' if Tclsh is running in interactive mode, otherwise a '0' is contained.envThe env variable is maintained automatically, as an array in Tcl and is created at startup to hold the environment variables on your system. Writing to the Tcl console The following recipe illustrates a basic command invocation. In this example, we will use the puts command to output a "Hello World" message to the console. Getting ready To complete the following example, launch your Tcl Shell as appropriate, based on your operating platform. For example, on Windows, you would launch the executable contained in the Tcl installation location within the bin directory, while on a Unix/Linux installation, you would enter TCLsh at the command line, provided this is the executable name for your particular system. To check the name, locate the executable in the bin directory of your installation. How to do it… Enter the following command: % puts "Hello World" Hello World How it works… As you can see, the puts command writes what it was passed as an argument to standard out. Although this is a basic "Hello World" recipe, you can easily see how this 'simple' command can be used for rapid tracking of the location within a procedure, where a problem may have arisen. Add in variable values and some error handling and you can rapidly isolate issues and correct them without the additional efforts of creating a Dialog Window or writing to an error log. Mathematical expressions The expr command is used to evaluate mathematical expressions. This command can address everything from simple addition and subtraction to advanced computations, such as sine and cosine. This eliminates the need to make system calls to perform advanced mathematical functions. The expr command evaluates the input and arguments, and returns an integer or floating-point value. A Tcl expression consists of a combination of operators, operands, and parenthetical containers (parenthesis, braces, or brackets). There are no strict typing requirements, so any white space is stripped by the command automatically. Tcl supports non-numeric and string comparisons as well as Tcl-specific operators. Tcl expr operands Tcl operands are treated as integers, where feasible. They may be specified as decimal, binary (first two characters must be 0b), hexadecimal (first two characters must be 0x), or octal (first two characters must be 0o). Care should be taken when passing integers with a leading 0, for example 08, as the interpreter would evaluate 08 as an illegal octal value. If no integer formats are included, the command will evaluate the operand as a floating-point numeric value. For scientific notations, the character e (or E) is inserted as appropriate. If no numeric interpretation is feasible, the value will be evaluated as a string. In this case, the value must be enclosed within double quotes or braces. Please note that not all operands are accepted by all operators. To avoid inadvertent variable substitution, it is always best to enclose the operands within braces. For example, take a look at the following: expr 1+1*3 will return a value of 4. expr (1+1)*3 will return a value of 6. Operands may be presented in any of the following: OperandExplanationNumericInteger and floating-point values may be passed directly to the command.BooleanAll standard Boolean values (true, false, yes, no, 0, or 1) are supported.Tcl variableAll referenced variables (in Tcl, a variable is referenced using the $ notation, for example, myVariable is a named variable, whereas $myVariable is the referenced variable).Strings (in double quotes)Strings contained within double quotes may be passed with no need to include backslash, variable, or command substitution, as these are handled automatically.Strings (in braces)Strings contained within braces will be used with no substitution.Tcl commandsTcl commands must be enclosed within square braces. The command will be executed and the mathematical function is performed on the return value.Named functionsFunctions, such as sine, cosine, and so on. Tcl supports a subset of the C programming language math operators and treats them in the same manner and precedence. If a named function (such as sine) is encountered, expr automatically makes a call to the mathfunc namespace to minimize the syntax required to obtain the value. Tcl expr operators may be specified as noted in the following table, in the descending order of precedence: OperatorExplanation- + ~ !Unary minus, unary plus, bitwise NOT and logical NOT. Cannot be applied to string operands. Bit-wise NOT may be applied to only integers.**Exponentiation Numeric operands only.*/ %Multiply, divide, and remainder. Numeric operands only.+ -Add and subtract. Numeric operands only.<< >>Left shift and right shift. Integer operands only. A right shift always propagates the sign bit.< > <= >=Boolean Less, Boolean Greater, Boolean Less Than or Equal To, Boolean Greater Than or Equal To (A value of 1 is returned if the condition is true, otherwise a 0 is returned). If utilized for strings, string comparison will be applied.== !=Boolean Equal and Boolean Not Equal (A value of 1 is returned if the condition is true, otherwise a 0 is returned).eq neBoolean String Equal and Boolean String Not Equal (A value of 1 is returned if the condition is true, otherwise a 0 is returned). Any operand provided will be interpreted as a string.in niList Containment and Negated List Containment (A value of 1 is returned if the condition is true, otherwise a 0 is returned). The first operand is treated as a string value, the second as a list.&Bitwise AND Integers only.^Bitwise Exclusive OR Integers only.|Bitwise OR Integers only.&&Logical AND (a value of 1 is returned if both operands are 0, otherwise a 1 is returned). Boolean and numeric (integer and floating-point) operands only.x?y:zIf-then-else (if x evaluates to non-zero, then the return is the value of y, otherwise the value of z is returned). The x operand must have a Boolean or a numeric value.  

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Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Applications on Windows Phone 7 Create enterprise-ready websites and applications that access Microsoft SharePoint on Windows Phone 7 Microsoft SharePoint 2010 End User Guide: Business Performance Enhancement Taking the basics to the business with no-coding solutions for SharePoint 2010   Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administration Cookbook Over 90 simple but incredibly effective recipes to administer your SharePoint applications Microsoft Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 Integration Techniques, practical tips, hints, and tricks for Silverlight interactions with SharePoint SharePoint Designer Tutorial: Working with SharePoint Websites Get started with SharePoint Designer and learn to put together a business website with SharePoint

Moodle Security Moodle is an open source CMS (Course Management System)/LMS (Learning Management System)/VLE (Virtual Learning Environment). Its primary purpose is to enable educational institutions and individuals to create and publish learning content in a coherent and pedagogically valuable manner, so that it can be used for successful knowledge transfer towards students. That sounds harmless enough. Why would anybody want to illegally access an educational platform? There are various motives of computer criminals. In general, they are people committed to the circumvention of computer security. This primarily concerns unauthorized remote computer break-ins via a communication network such as the Internet. Some of the motives could be: Financial: Stealing user and/or course information and selling it to other third-parties Personal: Personal grudge, infantile display of power, desire to alter assigned grades, and so on Weak points Moodle is a web application and as such must be hosted on a computer connected to some kind of network (private or public—Internet / Intranet). This computer must have the following components: Operating System (OS) Web server PHP Database server Moodle Each of these pieces can be used as a point of attack by a malicious user(s) in order to obtain access to the protected information. Therefore, it is our task to make all of them as secure as possible. The main focus will be directed towards our Moodle and PHP configuration. The secure installation of Moodle In this section we follow a secure installation of Moodle. In case you do not already have an installed instance of Moodle, we will show you the quickest way to do that, and at the same time focus on security. If you already have Moodle installed, go to the following section where you will see how to secure an existing installation of Moodle Starting from scratch In order to install Moodle on your server you need to install and configure the web server with support for PHP and the database server. We will not go into the specifics of setting up a particular web server, PHP, and/or database server right now, since it depends on the OS your server has installed. Also we will not explain in detail tasks like creating directories, setting up file permissions, etc as they are OS specific and out of the scope of this article. This section assumes you already know about your OS and have already configured your web server with an empty database. Every installation of Moodle must have: Web server with PHP support Dedicated database Two dedicated directories—one for Moodle and another for platform data We assume that your web server is Apache (Linux) or IIS (Windows), and that you use PHP 5.1.x or later and MySQL 5.0 or later. Installation checklist The following checklist will guide you through the basic installation procedure for Moodle. Download the latest stable version of Moodle from http://download. moodle.org/. (At the time of writing this article it is 1.9.8+). You have two options available on the download page—moodle-weekly-19.tgz or moodle-weekly-19.zip archive. In case you use Linux you can choose either. In case of Windows, ZIP file is the preferred choice. The reason for this is simple. Every Windows server comes, by default, with installed support for managing Zip archives. On the other hand, TGZ is readily available on every Linux distribution. Unpack the compressed file you just downloaded. This will produce a directory with the name moodle which contains all of the platform files. Move that directory to the web-root of your web server. After doing that it is recommended to make all files read-only for safety reasons. Create a directory called moodledata somewhere on the disk. Make sure that it is not in the web-root of your web server since that would incur a serious security breach. Doing that might expose all platform files submitted by course participants and teachers together with the course content to the outside world. Create an empty database (we suggest the name moodle or moodledb). The default database character set must be configured to utf8 and collation set to utf8_general_ci. It is recommended to have a special user for accessing this database with limited permissions. In case of credentials theft, a malicious user could only operate on data from one database, minimizing the potential damage. That database user account will need permissions for creating, altering, and deleting the tables, creating/dropping the indexes and reading/writing the data. Here is what you need to execute in your MySQL console for creating a database and user: CREATE DATABASE moodle CHARSET 'utf8' COLLATION 'utf8_general_ ci'; CREATE USER 'moodle'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'somepass'; GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER ON loomdb.* TO loom@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'somepass'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES; Start the installation by opening the http://url to local installation of the moodle (for example http://localhost/moodle) in your browser. Make sure it is a more recent browser with pop ups and JavaScript enabled. We recommend Internet Explorer 8+ or Firefox 3.6+. You will see the following screenshot. On the next screen, we need to specify the web address of the platform and the location of the moodle directory on the disk. Now, we must configure database access. Choose MySQL as database type, localhost as host server, set the name of the database (moodle), database user, and its password (moodle/moodle). You should leave the table prefix as is. Moodle checks the server configuration on this screen and displays the outcome. We can proceed with the installation only if all of the minimal requirements are met. During installation, Moodle generates a configuration file within the moodle directory called config.php. It is important to make this file read-only after installation for security reasons. In case Moodle cannot save config.php it will offer to download or copy content of the file and manually place it in the appropriate location on the server. See the following screenshot: We are now presented with terms of usage and license agreement. To proceed click yes. We can now start the installation itself. During that process Moodle will create all of the tables in the database, session files in the moodledata directory, and load some initial information. Make sure you check Unattended operation at the bottom. That way, the process will be executed without user intervention. After the database setup is finished, we are offered a new screen where we must configure the administrative account. With this user you manage your platform, so be careful about disclosing this information to other users. Field name Description Recommended action Username Defines user name inside the Moodle. By default it is admin. We recommend leaving the default value unchanged. New password Defines user logon password. Must supply valid password. First name Defines name of the admin. Must supply valid name. Surname Defines surname of the admin. Must supply valid name. E-mail address Defines user e-mail address. Must supply valid e-mail. E-mail display Define the visibility of your e-mail address within the platform. We recommend leaving it as is (visible to all). E-mail active Defines whether e-mail is activated or not. Set it to enable. City/Town Defines name of the city where you live. Moodle requires this value. Select Country Name of your country. Set it to your country name. Timezone Sets your time zone so that server can display time calculated for your location in some reports. If not sure what your time zone is, leave it as is.   Preferred language Choose the platform language. By default, Moodle comes only with support for English language. If you want to add more languages visit http://download.moodle.org/ lang16/ and download and install the appropriate files.   After configuring administrative user there is just one more step to complete and that is setting up the site title and short name. In the Full site name field, place the long name you would like to set for your website; it can have multiple words. In the Short name for the site field put one word without spaces which will represent your website. In the Front Page Description field put a longer description (one paragraph) that explains in more detail the purpose of your site. This is optional and does not affect the Moodle functionality at all You have now finished installing Moodle and should see the following screenshot:

  Away3D 3.6 Essentials The external library, swfvector, is contained in the wumedia package. More information about the swfvector library can be found at http://code.google.com/p/swfvector/. This library was not developed as part of the Away3D engine, but has been integrated since version 2.4 and 3.4, to enable Away3D to provide a way to create and display text 3D objects within the scene. Embedding fonts Creating a text 3D object in Away3D requires a source SWF file with an embedded font. To accommodate this, we will create a very simple application using the Fonts class below. This class embeds a single true-type font called Vera Sans from the Vera.ttf file. When compiled, the resulting SWF file can then be referenced by our Away3D application, allowing the embedded font file to be accessed. When embedding fonts using the Flex 4 SDK, you may need to set the embedAsCFF property to false, like: [Embed(mimeType="application/x-font", source="Vera. ttf", fontName="Vera Sans", embedAsCFF=false)] This is due to the new way fonts can be embedded with the latest versions of the Flex SDK. You can find more information on the embedAsCFF property at http://help.adobe.com/en_US/flex/using/WS2db454920e96a9e51e63e3d11c0bf6320a-7fea.html. package { import flash.display.Sprite; public class Fonts extends Sprite { [Embed(mimeType="application/x-font", source="Vera.ttf", fontName="Vera Sans")] public var VeraSans:Class; } } The font used here is Bitstream Vera, which can be freely distributed, and can be obtained from http://www.gnome.org/fonts/. However, not all fonts can be freely redistributed, so be mindful of the copyright or license restrictions that may be imposed by a particular font. Displaying text in the scene Text 3D objects are represented by the TextField3D class, from the away3d.primitives package. Creating a text 3D object requires two steps: Extracting the fonts that were embedded inside a separate SWF file. Creating a new TextField3D object. Let's create an application called FontDemo that creates a 3D textfield and adds it to the scene. package { We import the TextField3D class, making it available within our application. import away3d.primitives.TextField3D; The VectorText class will be used to extract the fonts from the embedded SWF file. import wumedia.vector.VectorText; public class FontDemo extends Away3DTemplate { The Fonts.SWF file was created by compiling the Fonts class above. We want to embed this SWF file as raw data, so we specify the MIME type to be application/octet-stream. [Embed(source="Fonts.swf", mimeType="application/octet-stream")] protected var Fonts:Class; public function FontDemo() { super(); } protected override function initEngine():void { super.initEngine(); Before any TextField3D objects can be created we need to extract the fonts from the embedded SWF file. This is done by calling the static extractFonts() function in the VectorText class, and passing a new instance of the embedded SWF file. Because we specified the MIME type of the embedded file to be application/octet-stream, a new instance of the class is created as a ByteArray. VectorText.extractFont(new Fonts()); } protected override function initScene():void { super.initScene(); this.camera.z = 0; Here we create the new instance of the TextField3D class. The first parameter is the font name, which corresponds to the font name included in the embedded SWF file. The TextField3D constructor also takes an init object, whose parameters are listed in the next table. var text:TextField3D = new TextField3D("Vera Sans", { text: "Away3D Essentials", align: VectorText.CENTER, z: 300 } ); scene.addChild(text); } } } The following table shows you the init object parameters accepted by the TextField3D constructor. When the application is run, the scene will contain a single 3D object that has been created to spell out the words "Away3D Essentials" and formatted using the supplied font. At this point, the text 3D object can be transformed and interacted with, just like other 3D object. 3D Text materials You may be aware of applying bitmap materials to the surface of a 3D object according to their UV coordinates. The default UV coordinates defined by a TextField3D object generally do not allow bitmap materials to be applied in a useful manner. However, simple colored materials like WireframeMaterial, WireColorMaterial, and ColorMaterial can be applied to a TextField3D object. Extruding 3D text By default, a text 3D object has no depth (although it is visible from both sides). One of the extrusion classes called TextExtrusion can be used to create an additional 3D object that uses the shape of a text 3D object and extends it into a third dimension. When combined, the TextExtrusion and TextField3D objects can be used to create the appearance of a solid block of text. The FontExtrusionDemo class in the following code snippet gives an example of this process: package { import away3d.containers.ObjectContainer3D; import away3d.extrusions.TextExtrusion; import away3d.primitives.TextField3D; import flash.events.Event; import wumedia.vector.VectorText; public class FontExtrusionDemo extends Away3DTemplate { [Embed(source="Fonts.swf", mimeType="application/octet-stream")] protected var Fonts:Class; The TextField3D 3D object and the extrusion 3D object are both added as children of a ObjectContainer3D object, referenced by the container property. protected var container:ObjectContainer3D; The text property will reference the TextField3D object used to display the 3D text. protected var text:TextField3D; The extrusion property will reference the TextExtrusion object used to give the 3D text some depth. protected var extrusion:TextExtrusion; public function FontExtrusionDemo() { super(); } protected override function initEngine():void { super.initEngine(); this.camera.z = 0; VectorText.extractFont(new Fonts()); } protected override function initScene():void { super.initScene(); text = new TextField3D("Vera Sans", { text: "Away3D Essentials", align: VectorText.CENTER } ); The TextExtrusion constructor takes a reference to the TextField3D object (or any other Mesh object). It also accepts an init object, which we have used to specify the depth of the 3D text, and to make both sides of the extruded mesh visible. extrusion = new TextExtrusion(text, { depth: 10, bothsides:true } ); The ObjectContainer3D object is created, supplying the TextField3D and TextExtrusion 3D objects that were created above as children. The initial position of the ObjectContainer3D object is set to 300 units down the positive end of the Z-axis. container = new ObjectContainer3D(text, extrusion, { z: 300 } ); The container is then added as a child of the scene. scene.addChild(container); } protected override function onEnterFrame(event:Event):void { super.onEnterFrame(event); The container is slowly rotated around its Y-axis by modifying the rotationY property in every frame. In previous examples, we have simply incremented the rotation property, without any regard for when the value became larger than 360 degrees. After all, rotating a 3D object by 180 or 540 degrees has the same overall effect. But in this case, we do want to keep the value of the rotationY property between 0 and 360 so we can easily test to see if the rotation is within a given range. To do this, we use the mod (%) operator. container.rotationY = (container.rotationY + 1) % 360; Z-sorting issues can rise due to the fact that the TextExtrusion and TextField3D objects are so closely aligned. This issue results in parts of the TextField3D or TextExturude 3D objects showing through where it is obvious that they should be hidden. To solve this problem, we can use the procedure to force the sorting order of 3D objects. Here we are assigning a positive value to the TextField3D screenZOffset property to force it to be drawn behind the TextExturude object, when the container has been rotated between 90 and 270 degrees around the Y-axis. When the container is rotated like this, the TextField3D object is at the back of the scene. Otherwise, the TextField3D is drawn in front by assigning a negative value to the screenZOffset property. if (container.rotationY > 90 && container.rotationY < 270) text.screenZOffset = 10; else text.screenZOffset = -10; } } } The result of the FontExtrusionDemo application is shown in the following image:

Getting started with Panda3D installation packages The kind folks who produce Panda3D have made it very easy to get Panda3D up and working. You don't need to worry about any compiling, library linking, or other difficult, multi-step processes. The Panda3D website provides executable files that take care of all the work for you. These files even install the version of Python they need to operate correctly, so you don't need to go elsewhere for it. Time for action - downloading and installing Panda3D I know what you're thinking: "Less talk, more action!" Here are the step-by-step instructions for installing Panda3D: Navigate your web browser to www.Panda3D.org. Under the Downloads option, you'll see a link labeled SDK. Click it. If you are using Windows, scroll down this page you'll find a section titled Download other versions. Find the link to Panda3D SDK 1.6.2 and click it. If you aren't using Windows, click on the platform you are using (Mac, Linux, or any other OS.). That will take you to a page that has the downloads for that platform. Scroll down to the Download other versions section and find the link to Panda3D SDK 1.6.2, as before. When the download is complete, run the file and this screen will pop up: Click Next to continue and then accept the terms. After that, you'll be prompted about where you want to install Panda3D. The default location is just fine. Click the Install button to continue. Wait for the progress bar to fill up. When it's done, you'll see another prompt. This step really isn't necessary. Just click No and move on. When you have finished the installation, you can verify that it's working by going to Start Menu | All Programs | Panda3D 1.6.2 | Sample Programs | Ball in Maze | Run Ball in Maze. A window will open, showing the Ball in Maze sample game, where you tilt a maze to make a ball roll around while trying to avoid the holes. What just happened? You may be wondering why we skipped a part of the installation during step 7. That step of the process caches some of the assets, like 3D models and such that come with Panda3D. Essentially, by spending a few minutes caching these files now, the sample programs that come with Panda3d will load a few seconds faster the first time we run them, that's all. Now that we've got Panda3D up and running let's get ourselves an advanced text editor to do our coding in. Switching to an advanced text editor The next thing we need is Notepad++. Why, you ask? Well, to code with Python all you really need is a text editor, like the notepad that comes with Windows XP. After typing your code you just have to save the file with .py extension. Notepad itself is kind of dull, though, and it doesn't have many features to make coding easier. Notepad++ is a text editor very similar to Notepad. It can open pretty much any text file and it comes with a pile of features to make coding easier. To highlight some fan favorites, it provides language mark-up, a Find and Replace feature, and file tabs to organize multiple open files. The language mark-up will change the color and fonts of specific parts of your code to help you visually understand and organize it. With Find and Replace you can easily change a large number of variable names and also quickly and easily update code. File tabbing keeps all of your open code files in one window and makes it easy to switch back and forth between them.

Alfresco 3 Business Solutions It is becoming more and more common that an ECM solution should include the possibility of storing e-mails in the repository, so they can be managed and searched in the same way all other content can. When we talk about managing e-mails in the content management system, it is important to know exactly what we mean by that. Today most companies and organizations want to use Alfresco for e-mail archiving, which is not something that is easily supported out of the box. E-mail integration solutions There are a number of different ways that an e-mail system can be integrated with the Alfresco CMS system. We will look at three of these and present advantages and disadvantages with each one. The three different e-mail integration solutions are: E-mail client talking directly to Alfresco via the IMAP protocol E-mail client talking to Alfresco via custom built plugin and Web Scripts E-mail server talking to Alfresco via custom module and Web Scripts E-mail client talking directly to Alfresco via the IMAP protocol This is the solution that is available out of the box with Alfresco. From version 3.2 and onwards Alfresco supports the IMAP protocol, which is one way an e-mail client can talk to e-mail servers (the other way is POP). So, with this solution Alfresco can behave like an IMAP e-mail server. The following image illustrates how this solution works: The e-mail clients typically receive an e-mail in their Inbox and then they can drag-and-drop that e-mail into an Alfresco folder via the IMAP channel. Any attachment can be extracted and handled separately to the e-mail in the Alfresco repository. This is a manual process that requires the end user to manage what e-mails he or she wants to be stored in Alfresco. Nothing happens automatically and no e-mails are stored in Alfresco unless a user manually drag-and-drops them there To achieve automatic archiving of e-mails, a user could set up an e-mail rule in their e-mail client that automatically files some or all e-mails into an Alfresco folder. However, we would still have to manually set up this rule on all users' e-mail clients. So we could not say that this would be an archiving solution that is transparent to the user, as it does not automatically force all e-mails to be saved for auditing purposes. Further on, the e-mail client has to be running in order for the e-mail rule to execute. This solution is best thought of as an e-mail management solution where users collaborate and share information in e-mails. The advantages of this solution are: No client installation:In most e-mail clients we can set up an extra IMAP account connecting to Alfresco without the need to install any extra software on the client workstation. This includes Outlook, Lotus Notes, Mozilla Thunderbird, and GroupWise. Users don't have to change working style:This is a big thing, users do not want to start learning a complete new way of managing e-mails, they just want to work in the same way they always have. The Alfresco account just shows up as another e-mail inbox in the e-mail client. Users can drag-and-drop e-mails between mailboxes just as they normally do. They do not have to learn any extra functionality. Users don't have to change working style:This is a big thing, users do not want to start learning a complete new way of managing e-mails, they just want to work in the same way they always have. The Alfresco account just shows up as another e-mail inbox in the e-mail client. Users can drag-and-drop e-mails between mailboxes just as they normally do. They do not have to learn any extra functionality. Supported out-of-the-box:No need to install any extra Alfresco modules, just configure some properties and the solution is ready to go. The disadvantages of this solution are: No document search:Users cannot search for documents in Alfresco and then attach them to an e-mail they want to send. Cannot set custom metadata:Because this solution does not use any custom plugin on the e-mail client side there is no possibility of setting custom metadata for an e-mail, such as for example customer ID, before it is stored in Alfresco. However, you can often solve this problem by creating business rules on the server-side and apply custom metadata based on which folder an e-mail is dropped into. No archiving solution:This is an e-mail collaboration and e-mail sharing solution, it does not force e-mail to be stored in the repository for compliance and regulatory reasons. Because this solution doesn't require any client installation, or updates to the Alfresco server, it will probably be the most popular e-mail management solution. It can also easily be extended with folder rules to create sophisticated e-mail filing solutions. E-mail client talking to Alfresco through custom built plugin and Web Scripts There are one or two products out there that have taken a different approach to integrating e-mail clients with Alfresco. One of these products is Anovio Email Management solution for Outlook 2007 (http://www.anovio.de/aem). This product provides a solution that enables you to also work with documents from the e-mail client, and search for documents via the e-mail client. To do this they had to implement a plugin for the e-mail client that is almost exclusively Outlook, and use Web Scripts to talk to Alfresco. The IMAP channel approach is not used as it can only handle e-mails. The following picture gives us an overview of this solution: This solution is also an e-mail management solution as it is up to the end user to actually save the e-mail into the repository. There is no automatic archiving going on. The advantages of this solution are: Document search: You can do a full text search for documents in the repository via the e-mail client. A document can then be attached to an e-mail that is about to be sent. Users don't have to change working style: Users can drag-and-drop e-mails into the Alfresco repository in a way they are used to. They do not have to use, and learn, the extra document management functionality in the Outlook plugin if they do not want to. Stores attachments directly: Attachments can be stored directly into the repository without storing the e-mail. Stores attachments directly: Attachments can be stored directly into the repository without storing the e-mail. The disadvantages of this solution are: Client installationYou can do a full text search for documents in the repository via the e-mail client. A document can then be attached to an e-mail that is about to be sent. Does not work for all e-mail clientsIt works only with certain e-mail clients, such as for example Outlook 2007, in the case of the Anovio product. Users have to learn new functionalityIf users want to handle documents from the e-mail client then they have to learn new functionality. Also, there are usually new menus and features users have to learn even for the standard e-mail management functionality. No archiving solution:This is an e-mail collaboration and sharing solution, it does not force e-mail to be stored in the repository for compliance and regulation reasons. Not supported out of the box:It is not a part of the Alfresco package, so will need to be purchased separately. This kind of solution can be very good for users that frequently need to attach documents from the Alfresco repository to e-mails that they are sending. However, if there is a larger user base, the maintenance burden could be quite substantial as you would need to install the plugin on every user's PC. E-mail server talking to Alfresco through custom module and Web Scripts This is the classical e-mail archiving solution where the e-mail system integration has been done on the e-mail server-side. This solution is totally transparent for the end users and usually complies with security regulations. What this means is that all e-mails are archived automatically without the user having to do anything, which guarantees that every incoming and outgoing e-mail has been filed and can be audited later. There are—unfortunately, at the time of writing—no such solutions available for Alfresco. But for reference purposes this is how such a solution would typically look: This solution would require us to build an extension module for the e-mail server that captures all inbound and outbound e-mails and stores them in Alfresco without the users having to do anything. So all e-mails are captured and stored for archiving and auditing purposes. Users can then for example, access the e-mails through the standard IMAP channel, if they are stored as standard MIME messages according to RFC-822 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc822) The advantages of this solution are: Supports archiving and auditingThis is the only solution that would be compliant with security regulations as users are not involved, and cannot decide if an e-mail should be stored or not. Users don't have to change working styleUsers can use their standard e-mail client to view archived e-mails. The disadvantages of this solution are: Requires server installation:We need to have access to the e-mail server and be able to install the integration module. This might be challenging in many situations when you might not be allowed to install anything on the e-mail server, or the e-mail server might be hosted externally so we would not have access to it. Attachments are not extracted:The attachments would probably not be extracted and sorted into their own subfolder. This is assumed as the purpose of an e-mail archiving solution to store the complete original e-mail for auditing reasons, and not for e-mail management use. Not a collaboration and sharing solutionE-mails are stored in an archiving structure and not in a project or case structure. Users would have more difficulty in collaborating around e-mail content. Duplicate e-mails exist:There would be a lot of duplicate e-mails because of security regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley that requires all e-mails to be stored for auditing purpose, even if it is a duplicate. Not supported out of the boxIt is not a part of the Alfresco package so will need to be purchased separately, if it is available This solution is mentioned here so we can easily tell the difference between an e-mail management solution and an e-mail archiving solution when we discuss this with potential clients. There has been a lot of misunderstanding around what e-mail integration solutions are currently available for Alfresco, where they are sometimes referred to as e-mail archiving solutions, which they are not.

As with the Domain, there are two basic paths in FEM to accessing things in an Object Store. The tree-view in the left-hand panel can be expanded to show Object Stores and many repository objects within them, as illustrated in the screenshot below. Each individual Object Store has a right-click context menu. Selecting Properties from that menu will bring up a multi-tabbed pop-up panel. We'll look first at the General tab of that panel. Content Access Recording Level Ordinarily, the Content Engine (CE) server does not keep track of when a particular document's content was last retrieved because it requires an expensive database update that is often uninteresting. The ContentAccessRecordingLevel property on the Object Store can be used to enable the recording of this optional information in a document or annotation's DateContentLastAccessed property. It is off by default. It is sometimes interesting to know, for example, that document content was accessed within the last week as opposed to three years ago. Once a particular document has had its content read, there is a good chance that there will be a few additional accesses in the same neighborhood of time (not for a technical reason; rather, it's just statistically likely). Rather than record the last access time for each access, an installation can choose, via this property's value, to have access times recorded only with a granularity of hourly or daily. This can greatly reduce the number of database updates while still giving a suitable approximation of the last access time. There is also an option to update the DateContentLastAccessed property on every access. Auditing The CE server can record when clients retrieve or update selected objects. Enabling that involves setting up subscriptions to object instances or classes. This is quite similar to the event subsystem in the CE server. Because it can be quite elaborate to set up the necessary auditing configuration, it can also be enabled or disabled completely at the Object Store level. Checkout type The CE server offers two document checkout types, Collaborative and Exclusive. The difference lies in who is allowed to perform the subsequent checkin. An exclusive checkout will only allow the same user to do the checkin. Via an API, an application can make the explicit choice for one type or the other, or it can use the Object Store default value. Using the default value is often handy since a given application may not have any context for deciding one form over another. Even with a collaborative checkout, the subsequent checkin is still subject to access checks, so you can still have fine-grained control over that. In fact, because you can use fine-grained security to limit who can do a checkin, you might as well make the Object Store default be Collaborative unless you have some specific use case that demands Exclusive. Text Index Date Partitioning Most of the values on the CBR tab, as shown in the figure next, are read-only because they are established when the Content Search Engine (CSE) is first set up. One item that can be changed on a per-Object Store basis is the date-based partitioning of text index collections. Partitioning of the text index collections allows for more efficient searching of large collections because the CE can narrow its search to a specific partition or partitions rather than searching the entirety of the text index. By default, there is no partitioning. If you check the box to change the partition settings, the Date Property drop-down presents a list of date-valued custom properties. In the screenshot above, you see the custom properties Received On and Sent On, which are from email-related documents. Once you select one of those properties, you're offered a choice of partitioning granularity, ranging from one month up to one year. Additional text index configuration properties are available if you select the Index Areas node in the FEM tree-view, then right-click an index area entry and select Properties. Although we are showing the screenshot here for reference, your environment may not yet have a CSE or any index areas if the needed installation procedures are not complete. Cache configuration Just as we saw at the Domain level, the Cache tab allows the configuration of various cache tuning parameters for each Object Store. As we've said before, you don't want to change these values without a good reason. The default values are suitable for most situations. Metadata One of the key features of CM is that it has an extensible metadata structure. You don't have to work within a fixed framework of pre-defined document properties. You can add additional properties to the Document class, and you can even make subclasses of Document for specific purposes. For example, you might have a subclass called CustomerProfile, another subclass called DesignDocument, yet another subclass called ProductDescription, and so on. Creating subclasses lets you define just the properties you need to specialize the class to your particular business purpose. There is no need to have informal rules about where properties should be ignored because they're not applicable. There is also generally no need to have a property that marks a document as a CustomerProfile versus something else. The class provides that distinction. CM comes with a set of pre-defined system classes, and each class has a number of pre-defined system properties (many of which are shared across most system classes). There are pre-defined system classes for Document, Folder, Annotation, CustomObject, and many others. The classes just mentioned are often described as the business object classes because they are used to directly implement common business application concepts. System properties are properties for which the CE server has some specifically-coded behavior. Some system properties are used to control server behavior, and others provide reports of some kind of system state. We've seen several examples already in the Domain and Object Store objects. It's common for applications to create their own subclasses and custom properties as part of their installation procedures, but it is equally common to do similar things manually via FEM. FEM contains several wizards to make the process simpler for the administrator, but, behind the scenes, various pieces are always in play. Property templates The foundation for any custom property is a property template. If you select the Property Templates node in the tree view, you will see a long list of existing property templates. Double-clicking on any item in the list will reveal that property template's properties. A property template is an independently persistable object, so it has its own identity and security. Most system properties do not have explicit property templates. Their characteristics come about from a different mechanism internal to the CE server. Property templates have that name because the characteristics they define act as a pattern for properties added to classes, where the property is embodied in a property definition for a particular class. Some of the property template properties can be overridden in a property definition, but some cannot. For example, the basic data type and cardinality cannot be changed once a property template is created. On the other hand, things like settability and a value being required can be modified in the property definition. When creating a new property with no existing property template, you can either create the property template independently, ahead of time, or you can follow the FEM wizard steps for adding a property to a class. FEM will prompt you with additional panels if you need to create a property template for the property being added. Choice lists Most property types allow for a few simple validity checks to be enforced by the CE server. For example, an integer-valued property has an optional minimum and maximum value based on its intended use (in addition to the expected absolute constraints imposed by the integer data type). For some use cases, it is desirable to limit the allowed values to a specific list of items. The mechanism for that in the CE server is the choice list, and it's available for stringvalued and integer-valued properties. If you select the Choice Lists node in the FEM tree view, you will see a list of existing top-level choice lists. The example choice lists in the screenshot below all happen to come from AddOns installed in the Object Store. Double-clicking on any item in the list will reveal that choice list's properties. A choice list is an independently persistable object, so it has its own identity and security. We've mentioned independent objects a couple of times, and more mentions are coming. For now, it is enough to think of them as objects that can be stored or retrieved in their own right. Most independent objects have their own access security. Contrast independent objects with dependent objects that only exist within the context of some independent object. A choice list is a collection of choice objects, although a choice list may be nested hiearchically. That is, at any position in a choice list there can be another choice list rather than a simple choice. A choice object consists of a localizable display name and a choice value (a string or an integer, depending on the type of choice list). Nested choice lists can only be referenced within some top-level choice list. Classes Within the FEM tree view are two nodes describing classes: Document Class and Other Classes. Documents are listed separately only for user convenience (since Document subclasses occur most frequently). You can think of these two nodes as one big list. In any case, expanding the node in the tree reveals hierarchically nested subclasses. Selecting a class from the tree reveals any subclasses and any custom properties. The screenshot shows the custom class EntryTemplate, which comes from a Workplace AddOn. You can see that it has two subclasses, RecordsTemplate and WebContentTemplate, and four custom properties. When we mention a specific class or property name, like EntryTemplate, we try to use the symbolic name, which has a restricted character set and never contains spaces. The FEM screenshots tend to show display names. Display names are localizable and can contain any Unicode character. Although the subclassing mechanism in CM generally mimics the subclassing concept in modern object-oriented programming languages, it does have some differences. You can add custom properties to an existing class, including many system classes. Although you can change some characteristics of properties on a subclass, there are restrictions on what you can do. For example, a particular string property on a subclass must have a maximum length equal to or less than that property's maximum length on the superclass.

  Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook Over 100 clear step-by-step recipes to create powerful, great-looking Drupal themes Take control of the look and feel of your Drupal website Tips and tricks to get the most out of Drupal's theming system Learn how to customize existing themes and create unique themes from scratch Part of Packt's Cookbook series: Each recipe is a carefully organized sequence of instructions to complete the task as efficiently as possible         Read more about this book       (For more resources on Drupal, see here.) Introduction JavaScript libraries take out the majority of the hassle involved in writing code which will be executed in a variety of browsers each with its own vagaries. Drupal, by default, uses jQuery, a lightweight, robust, and well-supported package which, since its introduction, has become one of the most popular libraries in use today. While it is possible to wax eloquent about its features and ease of use, its most appealing factor is that it is a whole lot of fun! jQuery's efficiency and flexibility lies in its use of CSS selectors to target page elements and its use of chaining to link and perform commands in sequence. As an example, let us consider the following block of HTML which holds the items of a typical navigation menu. <div class="menu"> <ul class="menu-list"> <li>Item 1</li> <li>Item 2</li> <li>Item 3</li> <li>Item 4</li> <li>Item 5</li> <li>Item 6</li> </ul></div> Now, let us consider the situation where we want to add the class active to the first menu item in this list and, while we are at it, let us also color this element red. Using arcane JavaScript, we would have accomplished this with something like the following: var elements = document.getElementsByTagName("ul");for (var i = 0; i < elements.length; i++) { if (elements[i].className === "menu-list") { elements[i].childNodes[0].style.color = '#F00'; if (!elements[i].childNodes[0].className) { elements[i].childNodes[0].className = 'active'; } else { elements[i].childNodes[0].className = elements[i].childNodes[0].className + ' active'; } }} Now, we would accomplish the same task using jQuery as follows: $("ul.menu-list li:first-child").css('color', '#F00').addClass('active'); The statement we have just seen can be effectively read as: Retrieve all UL tags classed menu-list and having LI tags as children, take the first of these LI tags, style it with some CSS which sets its color to #F00 (red) and then add a class named active to this element. For better legibility, we can format the previous jQuery with each chained command on a separate line. $("ul.menu-list li:first-child") .css('color', '#F00') .addClass('active'); We are just scratching the surface here. More information and documentation on jQuery's features are available at http://jquery.com and http://www.visualjquery.com. A host of plugins which, like Drupal's modules, extend and provide additional functionality, are available at http://plugins.jquery.com. Another aspect of JavaScript programming that has improved in leaps and bounds is in the field of debugging. With its rising ubiquity, developers have introduced powerful debugging tools that are integrated into browsers and provide tools, such as interactive debugging, flow control, logging and monitoring, and so on, which have traditionally only been available to developers of other high-level languages. Of the many candidates out there, the most popular and feature-rich is Firebug. It can be downloaded and installed from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/ firefox/addon/1843. Including JavaScript files from a theme This recipe will list the steps required to include a JavaScript file from the .info file of the theme. We will be using the file to ensure that it is being included by outputting the standard Hello World! string upon page load. Getting ready While the procedure is the same for all the themes, we will be using the Zen-based myzen theme in this recipe. How to do it... The following steps are to be performed inside the myzen theme folder at sites/all/ themes/myzen. Browse into the js subfolder where JavaScript files are conventionally stored. Create a file named hello.js and open it in an editor. Add the following code: alert("Hello World!!"); Save the file and exit the editor. Browse back up to the myzen folder and open myzen.info in an editor. Include our new script using the following syntax: scripts[] = js/hello.js Save the file and exit the editor. Rebuild the theme registry and if JavaScript optimization is enabled for the site, the cache will also need to be cleared. View any page on the site to see our script taking effect. How it works... Once the theme registry is rebuilt and the cache cleared, Drupal adds hello.js to its list of JavaScript files to be loaded and embeds it in the HTML page. The JavaScript is executed before any of the content is displayed on the page and the resulting page with the alert dialog box should look something like the following screenshot: There's more... While we have successfully added our JavaScript in this recipe, Drupal and jQuery provide efficient solutions to work around this issue of the JavaScript being executed as soon as the page is loaded. Executing JavaScript only after the page is rendered A solution to the problem of the alert statement being executed before the page is ready, is to wrap our JavaScript inside jQuery's ready() function. Using it ensures that the code within is executed only once the page has been rendered and is ready to be acted upon. if (Drupal.jsEnabled) { $(document).ready(function () { alert("Hello World!!"); });} Furthermore, we have wrapped the ready() function within a check for Drupal.jsEnabled which acts as a global killswitch. If this variable is set to false, then JavaScript is turned off for the entire site and vice versa. It is set to true by default provided that the user's browser meets Drupal's requirements. Drupal's JavaScript behaviors While jQuery's ready() function works well, Drupal recommends the use of behaviors to manage our use of JavaScript. Our Hello World example would now look like this: Drupal.behaviors.myzenAlert = function (context) { alert("Hello World!!");}; All registered behaviors are called automatically by Drupal once the page is ready. Drupal.behaviors also allows us to forego the call to the ready() function as well as the check for jsEnabled as these are done implicitly. As with most things Drupal, it is always a good idea to namespace our behaviors based on the module or theme name to avoid conflicts. In this case, the behavior name has been prefixed with myzen as it is part of the myzen theme.

Getting Started with IBM FileNet P8 Content Manager Install, customize, and administer the powerful FileNet Enterprise Content Management platform Quickly get up to speed on all significant features and the major components of IBM FileNet P8 Content Manager Provides technical details that are valuable both for beginners and experienced Content Management professionals alike, without repeating product reference documentation Gives a big picture description of Enterprise Content Management and related IT areas to set the context for Content Manager Written by an IBM employee, Bill Carpenter, who has extensive experience in Content Manager product development, this book gives practical tips and notes with a step-by-step approach to design real Enterprise Content Management solutions to solve your business needs        The following will be covered in the next article. A discussion of an Object Store and what's in it An example of creating a custom class and adding custom properties to it FEM must run on a Microsoft Windows machine. Even if you are using virtual machine images or other isolated servers for your CM environment, you might wish to install FEM on a normal Windows desktop machine for your own convenience. Domain and GCD Here's a simple question: what is a P8 Domain? It's easy to give a simple answer—it's the top-level container of all P8 things in a given installation. That needs a little clarification, though, because it seems a little circular; things are in a Domain because a Domain knows about them. In a straightforward technical sense, things are in the same Domain if they share the same Global Configuration Database (GCD) . The GCD is, literally, a database. If we were installing additional CE servers, they would share that GCD if we wanted them to be part of the same Domain. When you first open FEM and look at the tree view in the left-hand panel, most of the things you are looking at are things at the Domain level. We'll be referring to the FEM tree view often, and we're talking about the left-hand part of the user interface, as seen in the following screenshot: FEM remembers the state of the tree view from session to session. When you start FEM the next time, it will try to open the nodes you had open when you exited. That will often mean something of a delay as it reads extensive data for each open Object Store node. You might find it a useful habit to close up all of the nodes before you exit FEM. Most things within a Domain know about and can connect directly to each other, and nothing in a given Domain knows about any other Domain. The GCD, and thus the Domain, contains: Simple properties of the Domain object itself Domain-level objects Configuration objects for more complex aspects of the Domain environment Pointers to other components, both as part of the CE environment and external to it It's a little bit subjective as to which things are objects and which are pointers to other components. It's also a little bit subjective as to what a configuration object is for something and what a set of properties is of that something. Let's not dwell on those philosophical subtleties. Let's instead look at a more specific list: Properties: These simple properties control the behavior of or describe characteristics of the Domain itself. Name and ID: Like most P8 objects, a Domain has both a Name and an ID. It's counterintuitive, but you will rarely need to know these, and you might even sometimes forget the name of your own Domain. The reason is that you will always be connecting to some particular CE server, and that CE server is a member of exactly one Domain. Therefore, all of the APIs related to a Domain object are able to use a defaulting mechanism that means "the current Domain". Database schemas: There are properties containing the database schemas for an Object Store for each type of database supported by P8. CM uses this schema, which is an actual script of SQL statements, by default when first fleshing out a new Object Store to create tables and columns. Interestingly, you can customize the schema when you perform the Object Store creation task (either via FEM or via the API), but you should not do so on a whim. Permissions: The Domain object itself is subject to access controls, and so it has a Permissions property. The actual set of access rights available is specific to Domain operations, but it is conceptually similar to access control on other objects. Domain-level objects: A few types of objects are contained directly within the Domain itself. We'll talk about configuration objects in a minute, but there are a couple of non-configuration objects in the Domain. AddOns: An AddOn is a bundle of metadata representing the needs of a discrete piece of functionality that is not built into the CE server. Some are provided with the product, and others are provided by third parties. An AddOn must first be created, and it is then available in the GCD for possible installation in one or more Object Stores. Marking Sets: Marking Sets are a Mandatory Access Control mechanism, Security Features and Planning. Individual markings can be applied to objects in an Object Store, but the overall definition resides directly under Domain so that they may be applied uniformly across all Object Stores. Configuration objects: Directories: All CM authentication and authorization ultimately comes down to data obtained from an LDAP directory. Some of those lookups are done by the application server, and some are done directly by the CE server. The directory configuration objects tell the CE server how to communicate with that directory or directories. Subsystem configurations: There are several logical subsystems within the CE that are controlled by their own fl avors of subsystem configuration objects. Examples include trace logging configuration and CSE configuration. These are typically configured at the domain level and inherited by lower level topology nodes. A description of topology nodes is coming up in the next section of this article. Pointers to components: Content Cache Areas: The Domain contains configuration information for content caches, which are handy for distributed deployments. Rendition Engines: The Domain contains configuration and connectivity information for separately installed Rendition Engines (sometimes called publishing engines). Fixed Content Devices: The domain contains configuration and connectivity information for external devices and federation sources for content. PE Connection Points and Isolated Regions: The domain contains configuration and connectivity information for the Process Engine. Object Stores: The heart of the CE ecosystem is the collection of ObjectStores. Text Search Engine: The Domain contains configuration and connectivity information for a separately-installed Content Search Engine. In addition to the items directly available in the tree view shown above, most of the remainder of the items contained directly within the Domain are available one way or another in the pop-up panel you get when you right-click on the Domain node in FEM and select Properties. The pop-up panel General tab contains FEM version information. The formatting may look a little strange because the CM release number, including any fix packs, and build number are mapped into the Microsoft scheme for putting version info into DLL properties. In the previous figures, 4.51.0.100 represents CM 4.5.1.0, build 100. That's reinforced by the internal designation of the build number, dap451.100, in parentheses. Luckily, you don't really have to understand this scheme. You may occasionally be asked to report the numbers to IBM support, but a faithful copying is all that is required. Topology levels There is an explicit hierarchical topology for a Domain. It shows up most frequently when configuring subsystems. For example, CE server trace logging can be configured at any of the topology levels, with the most specific configuration settings being used. What we mean by that should be clearer once we've explained how the topology levels are used. You can see these topology levels in the expanded tree view in the left-hand side of FEM in the following screenshot: At the highest level of the hierarchy is the Domain, discussed in the previous section. It corresponds to all of the components in the CE part of the CM installation. Within a domain are one or more sites. The best way to think of a site is as a portion of a Domain located in a particular geographic area. That matters because networked communications differ in character between geographically separate areas when compared to communications within an area. The difference in character is primarily due to two factors—latency and bandwidth. Latency is a characterization of the amount of time it takes a packet to travel from one end of a connection to another. It takes longer for a network packet to travel a long distance, both because of the laws of physics and because there will usually be more network switching and routing components in the path. Bandwidth is a characterization of how much information can be carried over a connection in some fixed period of time. Bandwidth is almost always more constrained over long distances due to budgetary or capacity limits. Managing network traffic traveling between geographic areas is an important planning factor for distributed deployments. A site contains one or more virtual servers. A virtual server is a collection of CE servers that act functionally as if they were a single server (from the point of view of the applications). Most often, this situation comes about through the use of clustering or farming for high availability or load balancing reasons. A site might contain multiple virtual servers for any reason that makes sense to the enterprise. Perhaps, for example, the virtual servers are used to segment different application mixes or user populations. A virtual server contains one or more servers. A server is a single, addressable CE server instance running in a J2EE application server. These are sometimes referred to as physical servers, but in the 21st century that is often not literally true. In terms of running software, the only things that tangibly exist are individual CE servers. There is no independently-running piece of software that is the Domain or GCD. There is no separate piece of software that is an Object Store (except in the sense that it's a database mediated by the RDBMS software). All CE activity happens in a CE server. There may be other servers running software in CM—Process Engine, Content Search Engine, Rendition Engine, and Application Engine. The previous paragraph is just trying to clarify that there is no piece of running software representing the topology levels other than the server. You don't have to worry about runtime requests being handed off to another level up or down the topological hierarchy. Not every installation will have the need to distinguish all of those topology levels. In our all-in-one installation, the Domain contains a single site. That site was created automatically during installation and is conventionally called Initial Site, though we could change that if we wanted to. The site contains a single virtual server, and that virtual server contains a single server. This is typical for a development or demo installation, but you should be able to see how it could be expanded with the defined topology levels to any size deployment, even to a deployment that is global in scope. You could use these different topology levels for a scheme other than the one just described; the only downside would be that nobody else would understand your deployment terms. Using topology levels We mentioned previously that many subsystems can be configured at any of the levels. Although it's most common to do domain-wide configuration, you might, for example, want to enable trace logging on a single CE server for some troubleshooting purpose. When interpreting subsystem configuration data, the CE server first looks for configuration data for the local CE server (that is, itself). If any is found, it is used. Otherwise, the CE server looks for configuration data for the containing virtual server, then the containing site, and then the Domain. Where present, the most specific configuration data is used. A set of configuration data, if used, is used as the complete configuration. That is, the configuration objects at different topology levels are not blended to create an "effective configuration". CE has a feature called request forwarding. Because the conversation between the CE server and the database holding an Object Store is chattier than the conversation between CE clients and the CE server, there can be a performance benefit to having requests handled by a CE server that is closer, in networking terms, to that database. When a CE server forwards a request internally to another CE server, it uses a URL configured on a virtual server. The site object holds the configuration options for whether CE servers can forward requests and whether they can accept forwarded requests. Sites are the containers for content cache areas, text index areas, Rendition Engine connections, storage areas, and Object Stores. That is, each of those things is associated with a specific site.

  Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook Over 80 great recipes to create life-like Blender objects Master techniques to create believable natural surface materials Take your models to the next level of realism or artistic development by using the material and texture settings within Blender 2.5. Take the hassle out of material simulation by applying faster and more efficient material and texture strategies Part of Packt's Cookbook series: Each recipe is a logically organized according to the surface types with clear instructions and explanations on how these recipes can be applied across a range of materials including complex materials such as oceans, smoke, fire and explosions. Introduction Organizing your work, as you develop any project, will ensure that you achieve your task sooner and more efficiently. How to do this in Blender may not be immediately obvious. However, Blender has a raft of tools that will make your life, as a materials creator, so much easier. This article deals with the techniques that can be used to organize your textures and materials, and thus encourage some order to complex tasks. While Blender can be a very flexible 3D suite, allowing the designer more than a single approach to a simulation, it is better to develop a more ordered strategy to your material and texture creations. We will explore several recipes that attempt to show how to control material creation. However, apart from the inbuilt tools, there are several setups that will be dependent on personal preference. You are therefore encouraged to modify any of these recipes to suit your own approaches to organizing material production. Setting a default scene for materials creation It's always a good idea to set the initial state of Blender to suit your needs. For us, the primary task is to explore materials and texture creation. When you first install Blender, a default layout will be presented. From here, you can perform most tasks, such as modeling, and rendering, as you create your desired objects. We can aid the process of surface creation by improving the lighting in the default setup. Adding a second light can give better definition to objects that are rendered. Getting ready When you first download Blender, the default factory settings provide a simple cube illuminated by a single light. Even if you have already changed some of these defaults, you will be able to apply the suggested changes in this recipe on top of your personalized settings. So, you can either start with the factory settings or your own. How to do it... Start Blender, or select New from the File menu. This will ensure that any previous default settings are loaded. Move the mouse cursor into the main 3D view and press SHIFT+A to bring up the Add menu and select Lamp of type Hemi. Move, and rotate the lamp so that it will illuminate the shaded side of the default cube. Try to adjust its height and distance from the object similar to the default lamp. From the lamp menu, set the Energy value between 0.200 and 0.500. Render a quick scene and adjust as necessary. Move to the Render panel. In the Dimensions tab, select Render Presets. From the list, select HDTV 1080p. This will give a render size of 1,920 x 1,080 square pixels. However, alter the Resolution percentage slider to 25%. Just below the Aspect Ratio settings are two buttons, check Border and then ,Crop. Now, uncheck Border. This might seem strange but although the Crop checkbox is grayed out it is still set. Ensure the Anti-Aliasing tab is selected, and the figure below that is set to 8, with the anti-aliasing method set to Mitchell-Netravali. Ensure that the Full Sample is NOT, set. Under Shading, ensure Textures, ,Shadows, Ray Tracing, and Color Management are set, while Subsurface Scattering and Environment Map are not. Move down to the ,Output tab and from the list of choices select PNG. You can also change the Compression percentage to between 0% for a loss less saved image or up to 100% for full compression. I usually set to 0% to produce the clearest images. Finally, in the Performance tab, ensure that Threads is set to Autodetect. You can save these settings as the default scene by pressing CTRL+U and selecting Save User Settings. Now, whenever you restart Blender, or select a new scene, you will have a better lit setup with render settings providing an ideal environment to create materials. How it works... The recipe provides a relatively simple set of changes to the factory default scene. However, they are ideal for materials creation because they make it easier to judge the surface characteristics as you develop the material. We started by improving the default lighting by adding a second light to give a little more illumination to the shaded side of the objects you will be creating materials and textures for. Being able to set this as the default scene means we don't have to worry about special light setups every time we create a new material. It also helps with consistency because the levels of light will be very similar between every new material you create. It is not there to provide the finished lighting for every scene you create, but just to give a more even illumination when you test render materials you are developing. What we have done is produced a key light and a fill light, which is the minimum in almost any 3D lighting arrangement. The Hemi light offers a nice broad illumination but will not cast shadows. This is ideal for a fill light as it can represent bounced light off of ceilings, or walls, or even the outside world. The Point light source acting as our key light will cast shadows just as the strongest light in a natural environment would. When you have developed your materials, you can light the actual scene with a more complex or artistic lighting setup if you wish. For the majority of digital work, we need to use square pixels and a resolution that matches the size we wish to render to. Here, we have set the render size and resolution from the presets to HDTV 1080p. This produces a relatively large render area with square pixels. Square pixels are really important when developing objects or materials for digital work. It's possible to set different aspect ratios that would alter the screen and render proportions, which are of no value when creating models or developing and placing textures on them. If you eventually want to render out to these none square pixel ratios, do so only when all you're modeling and scene creation is finalized. The render panel offers several useful presets. These are based on screen resolution and pixel aspect ratio to exactly match the desired output. Be careful not to inadvertently select one of the non-square pixel ratios, like HDV 1080p. In the same step, we set the render resolution down to 25%. This will still give a render size of 480 x 270, which is OK for initial quick renders to check how a material is progressing. You can easily scale that up to 50% or 75% for more detailed renders. However, these will obviously increase the render times. If you create a border in the camera view, by pressing SHIFT+B, and dragging the orange dotted border, Blender will only render what's inside that rectangle. This is why we also checked the Crop checkbox so that Blender automatically crops the rendered image. If you perform a bordered render without the Crop set, the unrendered part is filled with black pixels. Therefore, setting the crop checkbox will ensure it will be cropped if selected. This will save valuable render time and also smaller image saves. Anti-aliasing Even if we are rendering to a large size, we should set Blender to anti-aliase the resultant render to remove the jagged edges that would otherwise appear. Here, we have set the antialiasing method to Mitchell-Netravali. This is probably the best of the available options. It will give very reasonable anti-aliasing at the relatively low setting of 8 without unreasonable render times. For final render, you might want to consider raising the level to 16. Turning off unneeded render settings Subsurface scattering and Environment map are not always required so can be turned off in the default scene. They can always be turned on for a particular material simulation that might require them. However, normally, they are not required and render times will be reduced by having them turned off. If you are working on a material that requires environment mapping or subsurface scattering, you can set these, then save your first file of the simulation. Saving a blendfile will save all additional settings as well as objects and materials. Blender offers an enormous range of output formats for your rendered still or animation masterpieces. You will not need to use them all so which should we choose as a default? PNG (Portable Network Graphics) has lossless data compression, as compared to JPG which is lossy, and therefore, the picture is degraded every time you save. However, PNG can efficiently compress images without the subsequent loss of quality. It can also handle alpha channels. It can be read by most web browsers so is suitable for the Internet. Because Blender can render an animation as a series of still images, it is ideal for producing animations as well. Several video editors, including Quicktime, Adobe Premiere, and of course Blender, can take these sequenced still PNG images and combine them into movie formats like .mov, .avi, .mp4, .mpeg, and so on. I would therefore suggest that PNG is probably the best all-round image format to set as default. If you're primary work is in either the game development, or print, fields you might want to consider using TGA (Truevision Advanced Raster Graphics Adapter), or TIFF (Tagged Image File Format). However, windows-based systems will not display thumbnails of TIFF formatted images at this time. There's more... There are other settings that you may want to consider as appropriate in a default scene. You can set locations of often used resources from the Blender User Preferences window, CTRL+ALT+U. Under the file menu of this preferences window, you can set file paths for such things as Fonts, Textures, Render Output, and so on. Many of these locations will be specific to your operating system and where you choose them to be. Blender defaults are fine, but if you want to be specific go to this window and enter your appropriate choices. To ensure they are saved as default, click the Save User Defaults button, or press CTRL+U. (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it). Additional settings for default scene If you have a powerful enough computer system, you might want to consider setting some more advanced options to make your test renders look really special. In some ways, what you will be doing with this recipe is creating a more production-ready materials creation environment. However, each render will take longer and if it is a complex mesh object with transparency and multiple large-scale image textures, you may have to wait several minutes for renders to complete. Although this may not seem to be a significant disadvantage, the extra render time can build up as you produce multiple renders to test the look of a material simulation. The renders reproduced in this article, and online, were created with these additional settings. The majority of development work also used these additional settings. While the majority of the simulations only took a few minutes to render at maximum resolution, one or two took a little longer. If that is the case it can slow down your material development, just turn some of these additional settings off before your first save of the blendfile. Any settings will be saved with the blendfile. Getting ready As we are adding additional settings to the default scene, ensure you have either just started Blender, or selected New from the File menu. This will set Blender back to the default scene ready for you to append the additional features suggested here. How to do it... In the 3D window, ensure that the cursor is at the center. SHIFT+S, Cursor to Center. Add new object of type plane. SHIFT+A, Mesh, Plane. Scale the plane by 50 Blender units. The easiest way to achieve this is to type S, enter 50 and press the ENTER key to confirm. Grab the plane and transpose it down -1 in the Z direction. You can either select the plane, then type G, Z, -1, and ENTER to confirm. Or press N to bring up the Properties panel and alter the Z location to -1.000. That has ensured that the plane is below any object you create from the origin. New objects are created at the cursor position and are always 1 Blender unit from their own origin, which will mean they should stand on the ground plane you have just created. Move to the Materials panel and create a new material, naming it ground. Under the Diffuse tab, change its color to R, G, B 1.000 or pure white. In the Specular tab, change the type to WardIso with an Intensity of 0.250, and a Slope of 0.300. Under the Shadow tab, select Receive and Receive Transparent. That has set up the ground ready to act as a shadow-receiving backdrop to our material creations. However, we need to set up a better shadow than that in the default key light setup. Select the key light. From the Light panel, select the Shadow tab and set Ray Shadow with Sampling set to Adaptive QMC, with Samples set to 6, and Soft Size of 1.000 and Threshold 0.001. Finally, we will set up ambient occlusion to give our models a little more shape. Move to the World panel and select Ambient Occlusion. Set its Factor to 1.30 and its Mix type to Multiply. In the Gathering tab, select Approximate, with Attenuation/Falloff selected and its Strength changed to 0.900. Set Sampling/Passes to 6. Select the Render tab, then save this as the new default setting by pressing CTRL+U. How it works... The plane is there just so that any shadows will have somewhere to fall. Shadow casting is normally created as a default once an object has a material assigned. In step 19, we also said let the plane receive transparent shadows. That means that objects casting shadows with an alpha component such as windows, or transparent materials, will have accurate shadows showing that transparency. We also set up soft raytrace shadows by turning on this feature for the key light. The important setting here is the number of samples. Too low and the shadow will look fake. Too high and the render times will become rather lengthy. Setting this to 6 is a good compromise for accuracy and speed. Finally, we have set up ambient occlusion, which simulates the darkening of shadows in crevices and shaded portions of a model. The higher the Factor level, the darker the ambient occlusion will become. Essentially, the darkening is being multiplied on top of the rendered image, although it can also be set to Add. Full raytraced ambient occlusion can take some time to compute, so it is good news that Blender has an excellent Approximate method, which is very quick. The Attenuation and Passes can be tweaked to give the best balance between accuracy and render time. Too low a setting will produce a spotty darkening that is not very real. We set Passes at 6, which is another excellent compromise. Ambient occlusion is only available if you render with raytrace enabled. To save all these extra setting as the default, we only had to press CTRL+U. Now, whenever you start a new scene, these settings will be pre-set. There's more... Occasionally, you may go too far with default settings and find that render times become too long when you only want to check how a material is progressing. Another common problem is that users will sometimes inadvertently save a pre-created scene as the default. If this happens, you can always return to the factory settings by pressing CTRL+N or choosing the Load Factory Settings from the File menu. As you will be doing this regularly, the default light setup is perfectly adequate. However, for a 'hero' render, I would recommend the following settings: Lights Your key light, the one to the right of frame, should be set to Energy 0.500. Under the Light panel, set ShadowRay Shadow. Under Sampling, set to Adaptive QMC and Soft Size to 5.318, and Samples to 6. This will create a nice soft shadow, which is more realistic than the sharp ray shadows produced by the default settings. Ambient occlusion Ambient occlusion can produce a nice darkening of overall illumination around those shaded parts in our renders. It adds a decent approximation of how real light and shadow spread through an environment giving a render depth. In our example, a Blend sky has been set in the World panel, with a Horizon color R and G set to 0.80, and B set to 0.69. The Zenith color has been set to R 0.69, G 0.75, and B 0.80. Ambient Occlusion has been selected with the following settings: Factor 1.00, and Multiply. Under Gather, Raytrace is selected and Sampling is set to Adaptive QMC, with Samples 24. Threshold and Adapt To Speed are all set to defaults. Under Attenuation, Distance is set to 10.000 with Falloff and Strength set to 0.220.

OGRE 3D 1.7 Beginner's Guide Downloading and installing Ogre 3D The first step we need to take is to install and configure Ogre 3D. Time for action – downloading and installing Ogre 3D We are going to download the Ogre 3D SDK and install it so that we can work with it later. Go to http://www.ogre3d.org/download/sdk. Download the appropriate package. If you need help picking the right package, take a look at the next What just happened section. Copy the installer to a directory you would like your OgreSDK to be placed in. Double-click on the Installer; this will start a self extractor. You should now have a new folder in your directory with a name similar to OgreSDK_vc9_v1-7-1. Open this folder. It should look similar to the following screenshot: (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge.) What just happened? We just downloaded the appropriate Ogre 3D SDK for our system. Ogre 3D is a cross-platform render engine, so there are a lot of different packages for these different platforms. After downloading we extracted the Ogre 3D SDK. Different versions of the Ogre 3D SDK Ogre supports many different platforms, and because of this, there are a lot of different packages we can download. Ogre 3D has several builds for Windows, one for MacOSX, and one Ubuntu package. There is also a package for MinGW and for the iPhone. If you like, you can download the source code and build Ogre 3D by yourself. This article will focus on the Windows pre-build SDK and how to configure your development environment. If you want to use another operating system, you can look at the Ogre 3D Wiki, which can be found at http://www.ogre3d.org/wiki. The wiki contains detailed tutorials on how to set up your development environment for many different platforms. Exploring the SDK Before we begin building the samples which come with the SDK, let's take a look at the SDK. We will look at the structure the SDK has on a Windows platform. On Linux or MacOS the structure might look different. First, we open the bin folder. There we will see two folders, namely, debug and release. The same is true for the lib directory. The reason is that the Ogre 3D SDK comes with debug and release builds of its libraries and dynamic-linked/shared libraries. This makes it possible to use the debug build during development, so that we can debug our project. When we finish the project, we link our project against the release build to get the full performance of Ogre 3D. When we open either the debug or release folder, we will see many dll files, some cfg files, and two executables (exe). The executables are for content creators to update their content files to the new Ogre version, and therefore are not relevant for us. The OgreMain.dll is the most important DLL. It is the compiled Ogre 3D source code we will load later. All DLLs with Plugin_ at the start of their name are Ogre 3D plugins we can use with Ogre 3D. Ogre 3D plugins are dynamic libraries, which add new functionality to Ogre 3D using the interfaces Ogre 3D offers. This can be practically anything, but often it is used to add features like better particle systems or new scene managers. The Ogre 3D community has created many more plugins, most of which can be found in the wiki. The SDK simply includes the most generally used plugins. The DLLs with RenderSystem_ at the start of their name are, surely not surprisingly, wrappers for different render systems that Ogre 3D supports. In this case, these are Direct3D9 and OpenGL. Additional to these two systems, Ogre 3D also has a Direct3D10, Direct3D11, and OpenGL ES(OpenGL for Embedded System) render system. Besides the executables and the DLLs, we have the cfg files. cfg files are config files that Ogre 3D can load at startup. Plugins.cfg simply lists all plugins Ogre 3D should load at startup. These are typically the Direct3D and OpenGL render systems and some additional SceneManagers. quakemap.cfg is a config file needed when loading a level in the Quake3 map format. We don't need this file, but a sample does. resources.cfg contains a list of all resources, like a 3D mesh, a texture, or an animation, which Ogre 3D should load during startup. Ogre 3D can load resources from the file system or from a ZIP file. When we look at resources.cfg, we will see the following lines: Zip=../../media/packs/SdkTrays.zip FileSystem=../../media/thumbnails Zip= means that the resource is in a ZIP file and FileSystem= means that we want to load the contents of a folder. resources.cfg makes it easy to load new resources or change the path to resources, so it is often used to load resources, especially by the Ogre samples. Speaking of samples, the last cfg file in the folder is samples.cfg. We don't need to use this cfg file. Again, it's a simple list with all the Ogre samples to load for the SampleBrowser. But we don't have a SampleBrowser yet, so let's build one. The Ogre 3D samples Ogre 3D comes with a lot of samples, which show all the kinds of different render effects and techniques Ogre 3D can do. Before we start working on our application, we will take a look at the samples to get a first impression of Ogre's capabilities. Time for action – building the Ogre 3D samples To get a first impression of what Ogre 3D can do, we will build the samples and take a look at them. Go to the Ogre3D folder. Open the Ogre3d.sln solution file. Right-click on the solution and select Build Solution. Visual Studio should now start building the samples. This might take some time, so get yourself a cup of tea until the compile process is finished. If everything went well, go into the Ogre3D/bin folder. Execute the SampleBrowser.exe. You should see the following on your screen: Try the different samples to see all the nice features Ogre 3D offers. What just happened? We built the Ogre 3D samples using our own Ogre 3D SDK. After this, we are sure to have a working copy of Ogre 3D.  

Away3D 3.6 Essentials Take Flash to the next dimension by creating detailed, animated, and interactive 3D worlds with Away3D Create stunning 3D environments with highly detailed textures Animate and transform all types of 3D objects, including 3D Text Eliminate the need for expensive hardware with proven Away3D optimization techniques, without compromising on visual appeal Written in a practical and illustrative style, which will appeal to Away3D beginners and Flash developers alike To demonstrate the basic materials available in Away3D, we will create a new demo called MaterialsDemo. package { Some primitives show off a material better than others. To accommodate this, we will apply the various materials to the sphere, torus, cube, and plane primitive 3D objects in this demo. All primitives extend the Mesh class, which makes it the logical choice for the type of the variable that will reference instances of all four primitives. import away3d.core.base.Mesh; The Cast class provides a number of handy functions that deal with the casting of objects between types. import away3d.core.utils.Cast; As we saw previously, those materials that can be illuminated support point or directional light sources (and sometimes both). To show off materials that can be illuminated, one of these types of lights will be added to the scene. import away3d.lights.DirectionalLight3D; import away3d.lights.PointLight3D; In order to load textures from external image files, we need to import the TextureLoadQueue and TextureLoader classes. import away3d.loaders.utils.TextureLoadQueue; import away3d.loaders.utils.TextureLoader; The various material classes demonstrated by the MaterialsDemo class are imported from the away3d.materials package. import away3d.materials.AnimatedBitmapMaterial; import away3d.materials.BitmapFileMaterial; import away3d.materials.BitmapMaterial; import away3d.materials.ColorMaterial; import away3d.materials.CubicEnvMapPBMaterial; import away3d.materials.DepthBitmapMaterial; import away3d.materials.Dot3BitmapMaterial; import away3d.materials.Dot3BitmapMaterialF10; import away3d.materials.EnviroBitmapMaterial; import away3d.materials.EnviroColorMaterial; import away3d.materials.FresnelPBMaterial; import away3d.materials.MovieMaterial; import away3d.materials.PhongBitmapMaterial; import away3d.materials.PhongColorMaterial; import away3d.materials.PhongMovieMaterial; import away3d.materials.PhongMultiPassMaterial; import away3d.materials.PhongPBMaterial; import away3d.materials.ShadingColorMaterial; import away3d.materials.TransformBitmapMaterial; import away3d.materials.WhiteShadingBitmapMaterial; import away3d.materials.WireColorMaterial; import away3d.materials.WireframeMaterial; These materials will all be applied to a number of primitive types, which are all imported from the away3d.primitives package. import away3d.primitives.Cube; import away3d.primitives.Plane; import away3d.primitives.Sphere; import away3d.primitives.Torus; The CubFaces class defines a number of constants that identify each of the six sides of a cube. import away3d.primitives.utils.CubeFaces; The following Flash classes are used when loading textures from external image files, to handle events, to display a textfield on the screen, and to define a position or vector within the scene. import flash.geom.Vector3D; import flash.net.URLRequest; import flash.display.BitmapData; import flash.events.Event; import flash.events.KeyboardEvent; import flash.text.TextField; The MaterialsDemo class extends the Away3DTemplate class (download code Ch:1). public class MaterialsDemo extends Away3DTemplate { One of the ways to manage resources that was discussed in the Resource management section was to embed them. Here, we see how an external JPG image file, referenced by the source parameter, has been embedded using the Embed keyword. Embedding an image file in this way means that instantiating the EarthDiffuse class will result in a Bitmap object populated with the image data contained in the earth_diffuse.jpg file. [Embed(source = "earth_diffuse.jpg")] protected var EarthDiffuse:Class; A number of additional images have been embedded in the same way. [Embed(source = "earth_normal.jpg")] protected var EarthNormal:Class; [Embed(source = "earth_specular.jpg")] protected var EarthSpecular:Class; [Embed(source = "checkerboard.jpg")] protected var Checkerboard:Class; [Embed(source = "bricks.jpg")] protected var Bricks:Class; [Embed(source = "marble.jpg")] protected var Marble:Class; [Embed(source = "water.jpg")] protected var Water:Class; [Embed(source = "waternormal.jpg")] protected var WaterNormal:Class; [Embed(source = "spheremap.gif")] protected var SphereMap:Class; [Embed(source = "skyleft.jpg")] protected var Skyleft:Class; [Embed(source = "skyfront.jpg")] protected var Skyfront:Class; [Embed(source = "skyright.jpg")] protected var Skyright:Class; [Embed(source = "skyback.jpg")] protected var Skyback:Class; [Embed(source = "skyup.jpg")] protected var Skyup:Class; [Embed(source = "skydown.jpg")] protected var Skydown:Class; Here we are embedding three SWF files. These are embedded just like the preceding images. [Embed(source = "Butterfly.swf")] protected var Butterfly:Class; [Embed(source = "InteractiveTexture.swf")] private var InteractiveTexture:Class; [Embed(source = "Bear.swf")] private var Bear:Class; A TextField object is used to display the name of the current material on the screen. protected var materialText:TextField; The currentPrimitive property is used to reference the primitive to which we will apply the various materials. protected var currentPrimitive:Mesh; The directionalLight and pointLight properties each reference a light that is added to the scene to illuminate certain materials. protected var directionalLight:DirectionalLight3D; protected var pointLight:PointLight3D; The bounce property is set to true when we want the sphere to bounce along the Z-axis. This bouncing motion will be used to show off the effect of the DepthBitmapMaterial class. protected var bounce:Boolean; The frameCount property maintains a count of the frames that have been rendered while bounce property is set to true. protected var frameCount:int; The constructor calls the Away3DTemplate constructor, which will initialize the Away3D engine. public function MaterialsDemo() { super(); } The removePrimitive() function removes the current primitive 3D object from the scene, in preparation for a new primitive to be created. protected function removePrimitive():void { if (currentPrimitive != null) { scene.removeChild(currentPrimitive); currentPrimitive = null; } } The initSphere() function first removes the existing primitive from the scene by calling the removePrimitive() function, and then creates a new sphere primitive and adds it to the scene. Optionally, it can set the bounce property to true, which indicates that the primitive should bounce along the Z-axis. protected function initSphere(bounce:Boolean = false):void { removePrimitive(); currentPrimitive = new Sphere(); scene.addChild(currentPrimitive); this.bounce = bounce; } The initTorus(), initCube(), and initPlane() functions all work like the initSphere() function to add a specific type of primitive to the scene. These functions all set the bounce property to false, as none of the materials that will be applied to these primitives gain anything by having the primitive bounce within the scene. protected function initTorus():void { removePrimitive(); currentPrimitive = new Torus(); scene.addChild(currentPrimitive); this.bounce = false; } protected function initCube():void { removePrimitive(); currentPrimitive = new Cube( { width: 200, height: 200, depth: 200 } ); scene.addChild(currentPrimitive); this.bounce = false; } protected function initPlane():void { removePrimitive(); currentPrimitive = new Plane( { bothsides: true, width: 200, height: 200, yUp: false } ); scene.addChild(currentPrimitive); this.bounce = false; } The removeLights() function will remove any lights that have been added to the scene in preparation for a new light to be created. protected function removeLights():void { if (directionalLight != null) { scene.removeLight(directionalLight); directionalLight = null; } if (pointLight != null) { scene.removeLight(pointLight); pointLight = null; } } The initPointLight() and initDirectionalLight() functions each remove any existing lights in the scene by calling the removeLights() function, and then add their specific type of light to the scene. protected function initPointLight():void { removeLights(); pointLight = new PointLight3D( { x: -300, y: -300, radius: 1000 } ); scene.addLight(pointLight); } protected function initDirectionalLight():void { removeLights(); directionalLight = new DirectionalLight3D( { x: 300, y: 300, The direction that the light is pointing is set to (0, 0, 0) by default, which effectively means the light is not pointing anywhere. If you have a directional light that is not being reflected off the surface of a lit material, leaving the direction property to this default value may be the cause. Here we override the default to make the light point back to the origin. direction: new Vector3D(-1, -1, 0) } ); scene.addLight(directionalLight); } The initScene() function has been overridden to call the applyWireColorMaterial() function, which will display a sphere with the WireColorMaterial material applied to it. We also set the position of the camera back to the origin. protected override function initScene():void { super.initScene(); this.camera.z = 0; applyWireColorMaterial(); }