How-To Tutorials

How Assignments Look to a Student I've logged out and then logged back in as student John Smith. As far as offline assignments are concerned, they are carried out in the real world. In that instance, Moodle is used to manage grades and notes. If I click on my Offline assignment, I just see a description of the assignment: My second assignment requires students to upload a file. In the next section, we experience a little of what life is like as a Moodle student when we try uploading a project submission to Moodle. Taking the Student's Point of View—Uploading a Project File It is a very good idea to see what we are expecting our students to do when we ask them to upload their project work to us online. At the very least, when we ask students to upload their project work to Moodle, we need to know what we are talking about in case they have any questions. If you don't have a student login or you are still logged in as yourself and have asked a colleague to check that your assignment is working correctly, it's a good idea to take a good look over their shoulder while they are running through the following steps. Together, let's run though what a student must do to upload a file to us... Time for Action – Uploading a File to an Assignment I only have one computer to work from, so the first thing to do is for me to log out and log back in as my pretend student "John Smith". If you have the luxury of having two computers next to each other then you can log in as yourself on one and your pretend student on the other at the same time. You might have two different browsers (e.g. Firefox and Internet Explorer) installed on the same computer. If so you can log into one as a teacher and the other as a student. Don't try to log in as two different people on the same computer using the same browser—it doesn't work. Now that you are logged in as a student... Return to the course main page and click on the Advanced uploading of files assignment you added earlier. You will be presented with the following page: The top half of the page is our description of the assignment. The second half allows us to upload a file and, because I configured the activity such that students could include comments with their submission, has an area allowing us to add a note. Students can browse for files and upload them in exactly the same way as we upload our teaching materials to the course files area. If they want to add a note, then they need to press on the Edit button (at the bottom of the previous screenshot). Click on the Browse... button now. The File upload dialog is displayed. This allows us to select a file to upload. You can choose any for now, just to prove the point. I've quickly created a text file using Notepad called example_submission.txt. Select the file you want to upload and press the Open button. The name of the file is now displayed in the box: Press the Upload this file button. You will now see the file listed in the Submission draft box: Repeat this process for your other project files. To add a note to go along with the submission, I can press the Edit button at the bottom of the page. Try leaving a note now. (If your assignment has been configured so that students are prevented from leaving a note, you won't have this option.) If I am happy that this is the final version of the project and I want to send it for marking, then I can press the Send for marking button at the bottom of the page. Pressing this stops me from uploading any more files: That's it. We're done: What Just Happened? It was easy for us to convert our assignments to Moodle. Now, we've seen how easy it is for students to convert to using Moodle to hand in their assignment submissions. Now, we've actually got a piece of work to mark (albeit a pretend piece), I am ready to start marking. Before moving on to the next section, make sure you are logged in as yourself rather than as a student. Marking Assignments Managing student grades and the paperwork associated with student submissions is one of my biggest headaches. By converting to Moodle, I can avoid all of these problems. Let's see how easy it is to mark assignments in Moodle. Marking Offline Assignments My Offline assignment, the poster project, is being carried out in the real world. Currently, I take a digital photograph of the poster and record my comments and grades on separate pieces of paper. Let's see how I can convert this to Moodle... Time for Action – Mark an Offline Assignment From the course front page, click on your Offline assignment. Click on the No attempts have been made on this assignment/View 0 submitted assignments link in the top right-hand corner of the page. You are now taken to the Submissions page. I've only got one student enrolled on my course—the pretend student my admin put on my course for me—so this is what I see: To grade John Smith's work, I need to click on the Grade link, found in the Status column. The Feedback dialog is displayed: I can use this dialog to comment on a student's work. At this point, I could include a photograph of the poster in the comment, if I wanted to (or I could get the students to take photographs of their posters and then to upload the images as part of an online submission).

When calls come into the switch, we tell Asterisk step-by-step how to handle the call. Steps can be as simple as playing a sound file to running a customized script. We are limited mostly by our imaginations at this point. We define all the steps we want Asterisk to perform in our extensions.conf file, in the customary location /etc/asterisk. Before we begin, we need to set priorityjumping=yes in the [general] section of extensions.conf. This will allow the tips and tricks in this article to work with Asterisk 1.6.x. Creating a context What is a context? Simply said, a context is a group of extensions. Each extension must exist within a context. There is more to contexts than grouping extensions though. In our extensions.conf file (or any included files), a context is denoted by square brackets "[ ]", as shown: [mycontext]. . . So, if a context is a group of extensions, why do we need more than one? Let's think for a minute. Not all employees should be able to dial every phone. Would you trust your 16-year-old intern with the ability to dial international calls? I wouldn't. Also, do you want your president to be bothered by customers in the waiting room who use a courtesy phone and misdial? We could find that hazardous to our continued employment. Certain extensions are hidden or made inaccessible from other extensions by context. This gives us some level of security. It also allows us to host multiple phone systems on a single server. Imagine you have two businesses on the same phone system, each with only two handsets. It'd be a pain to have each dial four digits to reach the other handset. We can use contexts to treat each company as if it were on a separate server. Something very important about contexts is we can include other contexts through the use of the include directive. This means all extensions in an included context are available. The value of this may not be immediately apparent, but soon we will see the full power of this tool. Suppose we have some context named bob. If we wanted bob to include default, then we would have the following in our extensions.conf: [bob]include => default This single line placed in any context gives that context the ability to dial any extension in the default context, as well as all contexts included in the default context. This means that if the default context included the foo context, then anybody in the bob context could dial extensions in the foo context. Suppose we had the following in our extensions.conf file: [foo]exten => 1,1,Playback(tt-monkeys)include => bar[bar]exten => 1,1,Playback(tt-weasels) Now I know that we haven't yet discussed the definition of extensions. That's OK. All we need to know is that extension 1 in foo will play back a file that sounds like monkeys, and extension 1 in bar will play back a file that says, "weasels have taken over our phone system". If we are in context foo and press 1, which file will play? This shows us the danger of include. We should be careful not to include multiple matches for the same extension. If we do include multiple contexts, the first included context with a match will win. Consider the following file: [foobar1]include => fooinclude => bar[foobar2]include => barinclude => foo If we are in context foobar1 and press 1, we will hear monkeys, while if we are in context foobar2 and press 1, we will hear weasels. While this can trip the unwary, we will use it to our advantage later on. Creating an extension We all have a good idea about what an extension is. On our legacy PBX, each handset was an extension. Pretty simple, right? While conceptually simple, there is a little wrinkle. If all we want to do is provide a few handsets, then there's one extension per phone. But Asterisk can do much more! We need to think of an extension as a group of commands that tells Asterisk to do some things. As amorphous as that may be, it's true. An extension can be tied to one handset, a queue, groups of handsets, or voicemail. An extension can be attributed to many different areas of the system. If you're familiar with programming terms, perhaps you could say that extensions are polymorphic. To go further, extensions can be used to provide access to other applications, sound files, or other services of Asterisk. Extensions are important to the magic of Asterisk. Now that we know why we create extensions, let's think about how we create them. Again, they are in the extensions.conf file, or any files that you include from there. We may decide to break up files such as extensions.conf into multiple configuration files. A common example of this is when we create large groups of extensions and choose to give each its own file. This also applies to the other configuration files we use. The general format for a line in the extensions.conf file is: exten => extensionnum,priority,action Let's take a closer look. Each line begins with the command exten. This is a directive inside Asterisk. You do not change this for each extension. Next, we have the extension number. Each extension has a unique number. This number is how Asterisk knows which set of commands to run. This extension can be detected in three major ways. First, the phone company may send it in with the calls, as is the case with DID numbers. Users can enter an extension using their touch-tone keys. Finally, there are a few special extensions defined. Some of these are: s: start extension. If no other extension number is entered, then this is the extension to execute. t: timeout extension. If a user is required to give input, but does not do so quickly enough, this is the extension that will be executed. i: invalid extension . If a user enters an extension that is not valid, this is the extension that will be executed. fax: fax calls. If Asterisk detects a fax, the call will be rerouted to this extension. Then we have the priority. Asterisk will start at priority 1 by default, complete the requested command, and then proceed to priority n+1. Some commands can force Asterisk to jump to priority n+101, allowing us to route based on decisions, such as if the phone is busy. Finally, we have the action. This is where we tell Asterisk what we want to do. Some of the more common actions we may want to perform are: Answer: This accepts the call. Many applications require that the call be answered before they can run as expected. Playback(filename): This command plays a file in .wav or .gsm format. It is important to note that the call must be answered before playing. Background(filename): This command is like Playback, except that it listens for input from the user. It too requires that the call be answered first. Goto(context,extension,priority): Here, we send the call to the specified context, extension, and priority. While useful, this can be a bad style, as it can be very confusing to us if something goes wrong. However, it can be a good style if it keeps us from duplicating extension definitions, as moves, adds, or changes would only have to be updated in one place. Queue(queuename|options): This command does what it seems like it should. It places the current call in the queue, which we should have already defined in the queues.conf file. Voicemail(extension): This transfers the current call to the voicemail application. There are some special options as well. If we preceed the extension with the letter s, it skips the greeting. When we place the letter u before the extension, it uses the unavailable greeting, and b uses the busy greeting. VoicemailMain: This application allows users to listen to their messages, and also record their greetings and name, and set other configuration options. Dial(technology/id,options,timeout): This is where we tell Asterisk to make the phone ring, and when the line is answered, to bridge the call. Common options include: t: Allow the called user to transfer the call by pressing the # key. T: Allow the calling user to transfer the call by pressing the # key. r: Indicate ringing to the calling party. m: Provide music on hold to the calling party. H: Allow the calling party to hang up by pressing the * key. g: Go on in the context if the destination hangs up. While this list is not exhaustive, it should be enough to get us started. Suppose we just want to make a DAHDI phone ring, which is on interface 1, and we are going to work completely in the default context. Our extensions.conf file would look like: [default]exten => s,1,Dial(dahdi/1) Pretty simple, right? Now, imagine we want to transfer to the voicemail of user 100 if someone is on the phone. As Dial sends you to priority n+101 when the line is busy or not available, all we have to do is define what we want to do. Our dialplan would look like: [default]exten => s,1,Dial(dahdi/1)exten => s,102,Voicemail(b100) Great! We have some of the functionality that users have come to expect. But are you happy yet? The problem is that a phone could ring for years before someone picks it up. So, for our next exercise, suppose we want to transfer the call to voicemail when the phone is not answered in 30 seconds. So, obviously, we're going to have to use the option in Dial to define a time-out. Our dialplan would have something like: [default]exten => s,1,Dial(dahdi/1|30)exten => s,2,Voicemail(u100)exten => s,102,Voicemail(b100) All we're doing is telling Asterisk how to handle the call, in a step-by-step way. It is important to think about all scenarios that a call can go through, and plan for them. Just to reiterate a point I made earlier, planning ahead will save us hours of debugging later. Suppose we want to send anyone who is in a place where they shouldn't be to user 0's voicemail, which will be checked periodically by the receptionist. [default]exten => s,1,Dial(dahdi/1|30)exten => s,2,Voicemail(u100)exten => s,102,Voicemail(b100)exten => i,1,Voicemail(s0)exten => t,1,Voicemail(s0) All right, we're getting somewhere now! At least we know each call will be handled in some way. What about faxes? Suppose we have only one fax machine (or a centralized fax server) on DAHDI interface 2, then our dialplan should look similar to: [default]exten => s,1,Dial(dahdi/1|30)exten => s,2,Voicemail(u100)exten => s,102,Voicemail(b100)exten => i,1,Voicemail(s0)exten => t,1,Voicemail(s0)exten => fax,1,Dial(dahdi/2) Congratulations! We now have a working phone system. May be not the most interesting yet, but we're making great progress. Don't worry, our phone system will grow in features. Now, to create a list of useful extensions, we need to define a set of commands for each handset we have. Suppose we have three SIP phone users—1001-1003, with extensions 1001-1003. Our default context would look like: [default]exten => 1001,1,Dial(SIP/1001|30)exten => 1001,2,Voicemail(u1001)exten => 1001,102,Voicemail(b1001)exten => 1002,1,Dial(SIP/1002|30)exten => 1002,2,Voicemail(u1002)exten => 1002,102,Voicemail(b1002)exten => 1003,1,Dial(SIP/1003|30)exten => 1003,2,Voicemail(u1003)exten => 1003,102,Voicemail(b1003)exten => i,1,Voicemail(s0)exten => t,1,Voicemail(s0)exten => fax,1,Dial(dahdi/2) For every extension we add, the length of extensions.conf will grow by four lines (three lines of code, and one line of whitespace). This is not very easy to read, and it is very easy to make mistakes. There has to be a better way, right? Of course there is! We can use macros to define common actions. We will create a special macro context. The name of these contexts always starts with macro-. Suppose we want to call this one macro-normal. We would have: [macro-normal]exten => s,1,Dial(${ARG2}|30)exten => s,2,Voicemail(u${ARG1})exten => s,102,Voicemail(b${ARG1}) Now, to create the same three extensions, we would have: exten => 1001,1,Macro(normal|1001|SIP/1001)exten => 1002,1,Macro(normal|1002|SIP/1002)exten => 1003,1,Macro(normal|1003|SIP/1003) So now, each extension we add requires only one extra line in extensions.conf. This is much more efficient and less prone to errors. But what if we knew that any four-digit extension beginning with a 1 would be a normal, SIP extension? Here it is time for us to discuss Asterisk's powerful pattern-matching capabilities. We can define extensions with certain special wildcards in them, and Asterisk will match any extension that fits the description. Using the underscore (_) character warns Asterisk that the extension number will include pattern matching. When matching patterns, the X character represents any number (0 to 9), the Z character will match the numbers 1 to 9, the N character represents numbers 2 to 9, and the period (.) represents a string of any number of digits. Also, we can use certain variables in our dialplan. One such variable is ${EXTEN}, which represents the extension that was used. So, for this example, we could use the following definition: exten => _1XXX,1,Macro(normal|${EXTEN}|SIP/${EXTEN}) This one line of code has now defined 1000 extensions, from 1000 to 1999. All we have to do is ensure that our voicemail user, extension, and SIP user are all the same number. Pretty cool, huh? Note that if we wish to modify the behavior of all extensions, all we have to do is modify the macro. This should help us quite a bit as we tweak Asterisk to fit our business needs.

We're teaching the topic of Rivers and Flooding; so to start with, we'll need to introduce our class to some basic facts about rivers and how they work. We aren't going to generate any new stuff yet; we're just going to upload to Moodle what we have already produced in previous years. Putting a worksheet on Moodle The way Moodle works is that we must first upload our worksheet into the course file storage area. Then, in that central section of our course page, we make a link to the worksheet from some appropriately chosen words. Our students click on these words to get to the worksheet. We've got an introductory factsheet (done in Word) about the River Thames. Let's get it into Moodle: Time for action-uploading a factsheet on to Moodle We need to get the worksheet uploaded into Moodle. To get this done, we have to follow a few simple steps. Go to your course page and click on the Turn editing on button, as shown in the following screenshot: Don't worry about all of the new symbols (icons) that appear. In the section you want the worksheet to be displayed, so look for these two boxes: Click on the Add a resource box (I'll go through all its options when we have a recap, later). Select a link to a file or web site. In Name, type the text that you want the students to click on, and in Summary (if you want) add a short description. The following screenshot gives an example of this: Once you're done with the above steps, click on Choose or upload a file. This takes you to the course files storage area. Click on Make a folder, and in the dialog box that is displayed, choose a suitable name for the folder all your worksheets will be stored in (we'll use Worksheets). Click on Create. Click on the folder that you just created (It will be empty except for Parent Folder, which takes you back to the main course files). Click on Upload a file. You'll be prompted to browse your computer's hard drive for the worksheet. Find the worksheet, select it with your cursor and click Open. It will appear as shown in the following screenshot: Click Upload this file. Once the file has been uploaded, it will appear as shown in the following screenshot: What just happened? We just uploaded our first ever worksheet to Moodle. It's now in the course files. Next, we need to make a link on the page that students can click on to get to that worksheet. I know what you're thinking! Thirteen steps, and there's still no sign of our River Thames worksheet on the course page in Moodle. Is it going to be this long-winded every time? Don't worry! There are only two—at worst three—steps left . And although it seems to be a lot of effort the first time, it gets much quicker, as we move on. We are also trying to be organized from the start by putting our worksheets neatly into a folder, so we took a couple of extra steps that we won't have to do next time. The folder will already be there for us. Ofcourse, you can just click on Upload a file and get your worksheets straight into the course files without any sort of order, and they will display for your students just as well. But when you have a lot of worksheets loaded, it will become harder and harder to locate them unless you have a system. Time for action-displaying our factsheet on our course page To get the Moodle course started, we need to create a link that—when clicked, will get the course started, carrying on from where we left off : Click on the word Choose to the right of your worksheet. (We are choosing to put this on Moodle.) The River Thames worksheet now shows in the Location box, under Link to a file or web site. We are almost there! Scroll down and make sure that you have selected the New window option in theWindow box, as shown in the following screenshot: At the bottom of the screen, click on Save and return to course. Done! The option Search for web page would take you to Google or another search engine to find a web site. You could put that web site into the location box instead, and it would make a clickable link for your students to follow. What just happened? Congratulations! You’ve now made a link to the factsheet about the River Thames that will get our Rivers and Flooding course started! By doing the final step above, we will get taken back to the course page where we'll see the words that we wrote in the Name box. They'll be in blue with a line underneath. This tells us it's a clickable link that will take us to the factsheet. If you can do that once, you can do it many times. Have a go hero-putting a slideshow onto Moodle It's important to go through the steps again, pretty quickly, so that you become familiar with them and are able to speed the process up. So why not take one of your slide shows (maybe done in PowerPoint) and upload that to Moodle? Start by creating a folder called Slideshows, so that in future, it will be available for any slideshows that you upload. Or, if you're too tired, just upload another sheet into our Worksheets folder and display that.   Putting a week's worth of slideshows into Moodle Now let's suppose that we have already prepared a week's worth of slideshows. Actually, I could say, a month's worth of worksheets, or a year's worth of exam papers. Basically, what we're going to do is upload several items, all at once. This is very useful because once you get used to uploading and displaying worksheets, you will very quickly start thinking about how tedious it would be, to put them on Moodle one at a time. Especially if you are studying ten major world rivers, and you have to go through all of those steps ten times. Well, you don't! Let's use my River Processes slideshows as our example. I have them saved in a folder on My Computer (as opposed to being shoved at random in a drawer, obviously!). Under normal circumstances, Moodle won't let you upload whole folders just like that. You have to either compress or zip them first (that basically means squeeze it up a bit, so it slides into cyberspace more smoothly). We first need to leave Moodle for a while and go to our own computer. I'm using Windows; for Macs, it will be slightly different. Time for action-getting a whole folder of work into Moodle in one go To view the slideshows, we need to upload the folder containing them from the hard drive of our computer into Moodle. Find the folder that you want to upload, right-click on it, and select Compressed (zipped) Folder within the Send To option. You'll get another folder with the same name, but in ZIP format. Go to your Moodle course page, and in the Administration box, click Files. We're in the course files storage area—this is another way in, if you ever need one! You can upload anything straight into here, and then provide a link to a file or web site. As we have done before, click on Upload and upload the zipped folder (it ends in .zip). Now click on Unzip, which is displayed to the right of your folder name (as shown in the following screenshot), and the folder will be restored to its normal size. What just happened? We put a bunch of slideshows about how rivers work into a folder on our computer. We then zipped the folder to make it slide into Moodle, and then when it was uploaded, we unzipped it to get it back to normal. If you want to be organized, select the checkbox displayed to the left of the zipped folder, and select delete completely. We don't need the zipped folder now, as we have got the original folder back. We now have two choices. Using the Link to a file or web site option in the Add a resource block, we can display each slideshow, in an orderly manner, in the list. We did this with our Thames factsheet, so we know how to do this. Alternatively, we can simply display the folder and let the students open it to get to the slideshows. We're going to opt for the second choice. Why? Bearing in mind about appearances being vital, it would look much neater on our course page if we had a dinky little briefcase icon. The student can click on the briefcase icon to see the list of slideshows, rather than scrolling down a long list on the page. Let us see how this is done: Time for action-displaying a whole folder on Moodle Let us upload the entire folder, which contains the related slideshows, onto Moodle. This will require us to perform only four steps: With editing turned on, click on Add a resource and choose Display a directory. In the Name field, type something meaningful for the students to click on and add a description in the Summary field, if you wish. Click on Display a directory and find the one that you want—for us, RiverProcesses. Scroll down, and click on Save and return to course. What just happened? We made a link to a week's worth of slideshows on our course page, instead of displaying them one at a time. If we looked at the outcome, instead of the icon of a slideshow, such as the PowerPoint icon, we get a folder icon. When the text next to it is clicked, the folder opens, and all of the slideshows inside can be viewed. It is much easier on the eye, when you go directly to the course page, than going through a long list of stuff . Making a 'click here' type link to the River Thames web site Let's learn how to create a link that will lead us to the River Thames web site, or in fact to any web site. However, we're investigating the Thames at the moment, so this would be really helpful. Just imagine, how much simpler it would be for our students to be able to get to a site in one click, rather than type it by hand, spell it wrong, and have it not work. The way we will learn now is easy. In fact, it's so easy that you could do it yourself with only one hint from me. Have a go hero-linking to a web site Do you recollect that we uploaded our worksheet and used Link to a file or web site? We linked it to a file (our worksheet). Here, you just need to link to a web site, and everything else is just the same. When you get to the Link to a file or web site box, instead of clicking Choose or upload a file…, just type in, or copy and paste, the web site that you want to link to (making sure you include only one http://). Remember that we saw earlier, that if you click on Search for web page…, it will take you to Google or some other Search Engine web page to find you a web site that you'd like to link to. The following screenshot shows how to link a file or web site into our Moodle course : That's it! Try it! Go back to your course page; click on the words that you specified as the Name for the web page link, and check whether it works. It should open the web page in a new window, so that once finished, our students can click on the X to close the site and will still have Moodle running in the background. Recap—where do we stand now? We have learnt a lot of interesting things so far. Lets just have a recap of the things that we have learned so far. We have learnt to: Upload and display individual worksheets (as we've worked on the River Thames) Upload and display whole folders of worksheets (as we did with the River Processes slideshows folder) Make a click here type link to any web site that we want, so that our students will just need to click on this link to get to that web site We're now going to have a break from filling up our course for a while, and take a step to another side. Our first venture into Moodle's features was the Link to a file or web site option, but there are many more yet to be investigated. Let's have a closer look at those Add a resource… options in the following screenshot, so that we know, where we are heading: The table below shows all of the Add a Resource… options. What are they, which is the one we need, and what can we safely ignore? You might recognize one or two already. We shall meet the others in a moment.

Library CherryPy comes with a set of modules covering common tasks when building a web application such as session management, static resource service, encoding handling, or basic caching. The Autoreload Feature CherryPy is a long-running Python process, meaning that if we modify a Python module of the application, it will not be propagated in the existing process. Since stopping and restarting the server manually can be a tedious task, the CherryPy team has included an autoreload module that restarts the process as soon as it detects a modification to a Python module imported by the application. This feature is handled via configuration settings. If you need the autoreload module to be enabled while in production you will set it up as below. Note the engine.autoreload_frequency option that sets the number of seconds the autoreloader engine has to wait before checking for new changes. It defaults to one second if not present. [global]server.environment = "production"engine.autoreload_on = Trueengine.autoreload_frequency = 5 Autoreload is not properly a module but we mention it here as it is a common feature offered by the library. The Caching Module Caching is an important side of any web application as it reduces the load and stress of the different servers in action—HTTP, application, and database servers. In spite of being highly correlated to the application itself, generic caching tools such as the ones provided by this module can help in achieving decent improvements in your application's performance. The CherryPy caching module works at the HTTP server level in the sense that it will cache the generated output to be sent to the user agent and will retrieve a cached resource based on a predefined key, which defaults to the complete URL leading to that resource. The cache is held in the server memory and is therefore lost when stopping it. Note that you can also pass your own caching class to handle the underlying process differently while keeping the same high-level interface. The Coverage Module When building an application it is often beneficial to understand the path taken by the application based on the input it processes. This helps to determine potential bottlenecks and also see if the application runs as expected. The coverage module provided by CherryPy does this and provides a friendly browseable output showing the lines of code executed during the run. The module is one of the few that rely on a third-party package to run. The Encoding/Decoding Module Publishing over the Web means dealing with the multitude of existing character encoding. To one extreme you may only publish your own content using US-ASCII without asking for readers' feedback and to the other extreme you may release an application such as bulletin board that will handle any kind of charset. To help in this task CherryPy provides an encoding/decoding module that filters the input and output content based on server or user-agent settings. The HTTP Module This module offers a set of classes and functions to handle HTTP headers and entities. For example, to parse the HTTP request line and query string: s = 'GET /note/1 HTTP/1.1' # no query stringr = http.parse_request_line(s) # r is now ('GET', '/note/1', '','HTTP/1.1')s = 'GET /note?id=1 HTTP/1.1' # query string is id=1r = http.parse_request_line(s) # r is now ('GET', '/note', 'id=1','HTTP/1.1')http.parseQueryString(r[2]) # returns {'id': '1'}Provide a clean interface to HTTP headers:For example, say you have the following Accept header value:accept_value = "text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5"values = http.header_elements('accept', accept_value)print values[0].value, values[0].qvalue # will print text/html 1.0 The Httpauth Module This module provides an implementation of the basic and digest authentication algorithm as defined in RFC 2617. The Profiler Module This module features an interface to conduct a performance check of the application. The Sessions Module The Web is built on top of a stateless protocol, HTTP, which means that requests are independent of each other. In spite of that, a user can navigate an e-commerce website with the impression that the application more or less follows the way he or she would call the store to pass an order. The session mechanism was therefore brought to the Web to allow servers to keep track of users' information. CherryPy's session module offers a straightforward interface to the application developer to store, retrieve, amend, and delete chunks of data from a session object. CherryPy comes natively with three different back-end storages for session objects: Back-end type Advantages Drawbacks RAM Efficient Accepts any type of objects No configuration needed Information lost when server is shutdown Memory consumption can grow fast File system Persistence of the information Simple setup File system locking can be inefficient Only serializable (via the pickle module) objects can be stored Relational database (PostgreSQL built-in support) Persistence of the information Robust Scalable Can be load balanced Only serializable objects can be stored Setup less straightforward

In this article, we take a turn from work I hand out to students to look at how to manage online work that they hand to me. Currently, in my Backyard Ballistics course, I set two major end-of-course projects: A poster on energy sources A PowerPoint presentation to the group on how energy is transferred when objects are sent flying through the air Both tasks are graded separately. For me, the final project has always been a major headache: PowerPoint presentations go missing. Students claim they have emailed me files that never reach me. The school technician is wary of students bringing in work on memory sticks because of the threat of viruses. Marking the posters involves me having to make notes on paper, and having a system to associate those notes with digital photographs of the posters stored elsewhere. I want a system that allows me to manage student submissions in one self-contained tool—one that can be used to exchange files between my students and me without having to resort to other, far less reliable, means. Also, wouldn't it be good to have a tool that allows us to comment (and include photographs, videos—in fact any digital file we liked) and grade work all under one umbrella? Added to that, my course specification also demands that I grade students on key skills: numeracy, literacy, and the use of ICT. And that's not something I specifically set a project for. I need a way of grading students on those aspects of their work separate from any specific project. That's another headache. That may seem like a lot to worry about, but (as you've probably already heard) by converting to Moodle, we can easily find answers to all of these issues, and more. So let's get on with it, and make a start with converting my poster project and PowerPoint assignments to Moodle... Converting Projects and Assignments Moodle provides four types of assignment activity, and they well match any kind of project that you are likely to set for your students. Turn editing on, go to any topic, and click on the Add an activity list. In this list, you will see the four different assignment types Moodle supports. They are: Offline activity—If your student projects can't be uploaded into Moodle because the student submission isn't electronic (just like my poster project), then you can manage grades and your notes on the students' work using this kind of assignment type. Online text—Students are going to be creating the assignment submission using the text editor built into Moodle. That's the one we've been using to create our course so far. Upload a single file—Does what it says on the tin. Students can only upload one file. Advanced uploading of files—Students can upload more than one file. As a teacher, you can also use Moodle as a mechanism for exchanging files between students, instead of using email (unreliable) or a memory stick (virus risk). Don't be afraid to have a look at these assignment types now. With editing turned on, click on Add an activity... and select any of the assignment types. That way you can get a feel for the kinds of settings we'll be dealing with before we start. Remember: if, while you are trying out different assignment types, you mistakenly add an assignment to your course, you can easily delete it by clicking on the delete icon next to the assignment name. How to Structure Converted Projects and Assignments Online For larger projects or assignments, it is often preferable to have a self-contained topic containing the actual assignment itself, together with any supporting materials. You could include exemplars (e.g. work from previous years) and give students the opportunity to discuss them together. Having the assignment, and all of the supporting materials, in a single topic means I can hide the assignment from students until it is time for them to attempt it. To demonstrate how this would be done, firstly we need to add a new topic to our course, and then we can add in an assignment activity... Adding a New Topic to a Course I'm going to add a new topic to my course specifically for my student projects. Then, I'm going to hide that topic until we have covered the course. I'm going to do the same with my projects and the support materials associated with them. You don't have to treat assignments in this way: as you work through the settings for a Moodle assignment, you'll notice that you can specify a time period that those assignments are available for (it's a setting we'll talk about shortly). I've decided that I want to ensure that my students focus on the preliminary work before they start attempting any assignments by completely hiding them from students. Time for Action – Add a Topic to a Course and Hide It Return to your course front page and choose Settings from the Administration block. Scroll down to the number of weeks/topics setting and change the number in the drop down-list to add another topic to your course: At the bottom of the page, press the Save changes button. That's it, we're done—and now there's a new empty topic at the end of your course. For the moment, I want to hide this topic from students. Click on the eye icon on the right-hand side to hide the topic: It depends on your theme but, to show that a topic is hidden, two grey bars are shown on the left- and right-hand sides of the topic: What Just Happened? We've now got a new, empty topic added to our course. I don't want students to be able to view the assignment until we are all ready, so I've hidden this topic from them for now. Which Assignment Type? For the purpose of my project I'm only going to be looking at two different assignment activity types—but by looking at those two we'll gain the skills and confidence to be able to use all four quite happily. Converting a Project to Moodle Example 1 – Using an Offline Assignment The first project—the poster project—is going to be converted to use the Offline activity assignment type. I'm going to use Moodle to manage student grades and to organize my notes and comments on their work. Let's see how easy it is to add an Offline activity... Time for Action – Add an Offline Activity Assignment Make sure you still have editing turned on. In the topic you want to add your new assignment to (in my case my new, hidden topic) click on Add an activity... and choose Offline activity from the list. You're now taken to the Editing assignment page. Give your assignment a name. Enter in a brief description of the task in the Description box. Don't worry if the box looks a bit small. We can include all of the supporting materials in the topic together with the assignment activity itself on the course front page: Use the Grade setting to specify the maximum grade you are going to give for this assignment. I'm going to leave the Grade setting at 100 (meaning I can grade this assignment out of 100). Maybe your assignment forms part of an overall mark and you need to mark it out of less. You could choose to mark your assignment in this way. You can even choose to create your own custom grades (e.g. A, B, C, D, E, or F), which we learn how to do later on in this article. Choose when you want the assignment to be available. I want to hide both the assignment and the supporting resources and materials, so this option is redundant. I do have the option of disabling this setting so this is what I'm going to do, in this instance. If you aren't hiding the assignment, the Available from and Due date settings are a useful way of preventing students handing work to you before you are ready: That's it! We're done. Press the Save and return to course button. A new assignment has just been added to the course: What Just Happened? Converting my poster project to Moodle was as easy as adding an Offline assignment activity to my Backyard Ballistics course. Click on the assignment now to see what happens. You'll see a screen displaying the task you've just set, and in the top right-hand corner you'll see a No attempts have been made on this assignment link: Click on that link now. You'll be taken to a list of students who are enrolled on your course. If you don't have any students enrolled on your course, then this is what you will see: I don't yet want students enrolled on my course until I know it is set up to be just how I want it. The solution is to introduce a "control student" on our course, and later in this article we'll see how. Before we do that, I'm going to think about the second assignment I need to convert—where students are required to produce a PowerPoint presentation.

By the end of this article, you should be able to: Add multiple columns to a report Group report data Add images and charts to a report Creating more elaborate reports In this section, we will modify the simple report we created in the previous article to illustrate how to add images, charts, and multiple columns to a report. We will also see how to group report data. We will perform all of these tasks graphically with iReport. Adding images to a report Adding static images to a report is very simple with iReport. Just drag the Image component from the Palette to the band where it will be rendered in the report. When we drop the image component into the appropriate band, a window pops up asking us to specify the location of the image file to display. After we select the image, we can drag it to its exact location where it will be rendered. As we can see, adding images to a report using iReport couldn't be any simpler. Adding multiple columns to a report The report we've been creating so far in this article (continued from the first part of this article, Graphical Report Design with iReport: Part 1, for database details, refer to Database for our reports section of Creating Dynamic Reports from Databases) contains over 11,000 records. It spans over 300 pages. As we can see, there is a lot of space between the text fields. Perhaps it would be a good idea to place the text fields closer together and add an additional column. This would cut the number of pages in the report by half. To change the number of columns in the report, we simply need to select the root report node in the Report Inspector window at the top left and then modify its Columns property in the Properties window at the bottom right. When we modify the Columns property, iReport automatically modifies the Column Width property to an appropriate value. We are free, of course, to modify this value if it doesn't meet our needs. As our report now contains more than one column, it makes sense to re-add the Column Header band we deleted earlier. This can be done by right-clicking on the band in the Report Inspector window and selecting Add Band. Next, we need to move the static text in the page header to the Column Header band. To move any element from one band to another, all we need to do is drag it to the appropriate band in the Report Inspector window. Next, we need to resize and reposition the text fields in the Detail band and the static text elements in the Column Header band so that they fit in the new, narrower width of the columns. Also, resize the Column Header band to avoid having too much whitespace between the elements of the Column Header and Detail bands. Our report now looks like this: We can see the resulting report by clicking on Preview. Grouping report data Suppose we are asked to modify our report so that data is divided by the state where the aircraft is registered. This is a perfect situation to apply report groups. Report groups allow us to divide report data when a report expression changes. To define a report group, we need to right-click on the root report node in the Report Inspector window, and then select Add Report Group. Then, enter the Group name and indicate whether we want to group by a field or by a report expression. In our case, we want to group the data by state field. After clicking on Next>, we need to indicate whether we want to add a group header and/or footer to our report. For aesthetic purposes, we move the static text fields in the Column Header band to the Group Header band, remove the column and page header bands, and add additional information to the Group Header band. After making all of these changes, our report preview will look like this: We can preview the report by clicking Preview.

Exporting data from the D-Cube You can export data from the D-Cube into an ASCII file or to the clipboard. The export function gives you the ability to format how you want to export the data. You can set the delimiter, insert headers, and arrange the order of the dimensions. You can also suppress zero values in calculated data so that the export function will not include records that have zero or null data. To export from a D-Cube: Open the D-Cube. Click on D-Cube|Export. The Export function displays four tabs: Export Header/Footer Zeros Show Det/Tot Export Observe the following: Under the Export to option, select whether you want to export to a file or to the clipboard. If you are exporting to a file, enter the path and name of the file that you want to export the data to. Alternatively, you can click on the Browse button to save the file. Click the Select button to open the item selection box, and then select the dimension items containing the data you want to export. If you have a saved selection containing the data that you want to export, then you can load that selection into the dimension selection box. Groups Select how you want the dimensions to be displayed as columns: Single Column: Export each dimension as a single column. Multiple Column: Select one dimension whose items you want displayed as separate columns, and set the rest of the dimensions as single columns. The last dimension marked as [data] under the Dimension Order box contains the items that will used as multiple columns (see the following example): Single vs. multiple columns The following table illustrates a single column file with each dimension laid out as a separate column:       The following table illustrates a multiple column file. In this example, the items in the Month dimension are displayed as separate columns.       Format In the Format section, select the following: Separator: Set the delimiter to be used in the export file. Select Comma, Tab, Semicolon, or Aligned Columns. Column Headings Normal: This is the default setting. If you export in multiple columns, this option will include columns headers on each page but not for the rows and page dimensions. If you export in single columns, this no column headers will be included. At Top: This option includes the D-List names and column headers at the top of first page only. Above Each Page: This option includes the D-List names and column headers at the top of each page of the export. None: This option does not include column headers at all. Mode Append: Add the data to any previously-exported data in the same file. Overwrite: Overwrite any previously-exported data in the same file. Data formats: Apply Regional Settings: Select this checkbox to use the regional settings in your operating system as the format for the export. Pipes as Spaces: Select this checkbox to replace any pipe symbols (|) with spaces. Plain Number Format: Select this option to remove any numeric formats that you applied in the D-List. The values are exported in as many decimal places as is necessary in is basic format. All commas, currency signs, and percentages will be removed. Negative values enclosed in parenthesis will be prefixed with a minus sign. Non-numeric formats (Text, Date, and D-List) will be retained. Text Qualifier: Choose whether you want the data exported with a single quote or double quote text qualifier. Dimension Order: Determine the order of the dimensions that will be exported as columns. Move the dimensions up or down using the arrows, or click the Dimension Order button to arrange the dimensions according to their order in the D-Cube. Header/Footer This option lets you enter a title and/or footer to the export file. Enter the title or footnote by typing directly into the text box. Zeros This option suppresses any record with zero values. This option is independent of the zero suppression in force when you are viewing the D-Cube. You can suppress zeros in rows or columns by highlighting the dimension labeled R or C respectively. You can deselect a selected dimension by pressing Ctrl and clicking on the highlighted item. To suppress zeros in pages, select Suppress Zero Pages. If you want to suppress zeros in all of the dimensions, highlight all of the dimensions and then select Suppress Zero Pages. Show Det/Tot This option lets you choose whether you want to export only detail items or calculated items by highlighting the dimensions containing the detail or subtotal items, as appropriate. There are separate selection boxes for detail and total items. Breakback Breakback is a powerful feature in IBM Cognos Planning. With Breakback, you can enter data into calculated cells and change the variables that make up the formula according to rules that you specify. Breakback is commonly used to propagate changes to a total across its detail items, in proportion to the value of the detail items. Suppose you have five products, showing a total of 1500 units:   Product Current Product A 100 Product B 200 Product C 300 Product D 400 Product E 500 TOTAL 1500 With Breakback, if you enter 3000 in the total, the detail products will change as follows:   Product With Breakback Product A 200 Product B 400 Product C 600 Product D 800 Product E 1000 TOTAL 3000 Breakback distributes the changes in the TOTAL to Products A to E in proportion to their original share of the total. Breakback works on addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. It can handle multiple calculations across multiple dimensions and hierarchies. Breakback on hierarchies You can apply Breakback on a grand total consisting of multiple subtotals across various hierarchical levels. In a simple hierarchy where you have only one subtotal, Breakback distributes the value across its children proportionately. In a multi-level hierarchy, Breakback cascades the changes one level at a time down through the hierarchy. If you enter a value into a total, Breakback will distribute the value proportionately to the subtotals immediately below the total, then to the subtotal the next level down, and so on.

Interactive HTML report properties All reporting elements share a common set of HTML-related properties that may be used to create a dynamic report. Below is a list of properties and their uses: HTML Properties class This property sets the class attribute of the current HTML entity to the specified value. name This property sets the name attribute of the current HTML entity to the specified value. title This property sets the title attribute of the current HTML entity to the specified value. xml-id This property allows the naming of the current HTML entity, setting the id attribute, making it possible to reference in outside scripts. append-body This property allows the placement of raw HTML within the body of the HTML document, prior to the rendering of the current element. append-body-footer This property allows the placement of raw HTML within the body of the HTML document, after the rendering of the current element. append-header Defined only at the master report level, this property allows the inclusion of raw HTML within the header of the HTML document generated. This location is traditionally used to load additional CSS files, as well as external JavaScript files.

Let's get started. CallerID Lookup Sources Caller ID lookup sources supplement the caller ID name information that is sent by most telephone companies. A caller ID lookup source contains a list of phone numbers matched with names. When FreePBX receives a call, it can query a lookup source with the number of the caller. If the caller is on the lookup source's list, a name is returned that will be sent along with the call wherever the call gets routed to. The name will be visible on a phone's caller ID display (if the phone supports caller ID), and is also visible in the FreePBX call detail records. In order to set up a caller ID lookup source, click on the CallerID Lookup Sources link under the Inbound Call Control section of the navigation menu on the left side of the FreePBX interface as shown in the following screenshot: The Add Source screen has three common configuration options: Source Description Source type Cache results Source Description is used to identify this lookup source when it is being selected as a caller ID lookup source during the configuration of an inbound route. Source type is used to select the method that this source will use to obtain caller ID name information. FreePBX allows a lookup source to use one of the following methods: ENUM: FreePBX will use whichever ENUM servers are configured in /etc/asterisk/enum.conf to return caller ID name information. By default, this file contains the e164.arpa and e164.org zones for lookups. All ENUM servers in the enum.conf file will be queried. HTTP: FreePBX will query a web service for caller ID name information using the HTTP protocol. A lookup source that uses HTTP to query for information can use services such as Google Phonebook or online versions of the white/yellow pages to return caller ID names. When HTTP is selected as the source type, six additional options will appear for configuration. These options are discussed in the HTTP source type section. MySQL: FreePBX will connect to a MySQL database to query for caller ID name information. Usually, this will be a database belonging to a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software package in which all customer information is stored. When MySQL is selected as the Source type, five additional options will appear for configuration. These options are discussed later in the MySQL source type section. SugarCRM: As of FreePBX version 2.5.1, this option is not yet implemented. In the future, this Source type option will allow FreePBX to connect to the database used by the SugarCRM software package to query for caller ID name information. If the Cache results checkbox is selected, then when a lookup source returns results they will be cached in the local AstDB database for quicker retrieval the next time the same number is looked up. Note that values cached in the AstDB will persist past a restart of Asterisk and a reboot of the PBX. Once a caller ID name has been cached, FreePBX will always return that name even if the name in the lookup source changes. Caching must be disabled for a new caller ID name to be returned from the lookup source. Once all configuration options have been filled out, click on the Submit Changes button followed by the orange-colored Apply Configuration Changes bar to make the new lookup source available to inbound routes. Now that we have an available lookup source, we can configure an inbound route to use this source to set caller ID information. Click on the Inbound Routes link under the Inbound Call Control section of the navigation menu on the left side of the FreePBX interface as shown in the following screenshot: Click the name of the inbound route that will use the new lookup source in the menu on the right side of the page (in this example, DID 5551234567) as shown in the following screenshot: Scroll down the page to the CID Lookup Source section. Select the name of the new lookup source from the Source drop-down menu: Click on the Submit button at the bottom of the page, followed by the orange-colored Apply Configuration Changes bar at the top of the page. Calls that are routing using this inbound route will now query our new lookup source for caller ID name information.

Adding the First Question Page Immediately after you save your lesson settings, Moodle presents you with the following page: At this point, it is time to create the first question page or import question pages from another system. Let's take a look at each of your options. Importing Questions If you choose to Import questions, you can import questions created by Moodle and other online learning systems. Some of the formats that you can import are: GIFT and Moodle XML These are Moodle's proprietary formats. GIFT is text only, and XML can include graphics and special characters. Aiken This format is for multiple choice questions. Missing Word This format is for missing word multiple choice questions. Blackboard If you're converting from Blackboard to Moodle, you can export questions from Blackboard and import them into Moodle. WebCT This format supports multiple choice questions, and short answers questions from WebCT. Course Test Manager If you're converting from Course Test Manager to Moodle, you can export questions from Course Test Manager, and import them into Moodle. Embedded Answers (Cloze) This format is a multiple question, multiple-choice question with embedded answers.  

Windows OS for Windows Mobile is available in various versions, but for this article we will be using Windows Mobile 6. Windows Mobile 6 uses .NET Compact Framework v2 SP2, and has 3 different versions: Windows Mobile 6 Standard (phones without Touch Screen) Windows Mobile 6 Professional (with Phone functionality) Windows Mobile 6 Classic (without Phone functionality) Windows Mobile 6.1 and Windows Mobile 6.5 are other 2 higher versions available with some additional features as compared to Windows Mobile 6. Windows Mobile 7 expected to be released in 2010 and is said to have major updates. This article concentrates on development on Windows Mobile 6 Professional. Software Prerequisite This article will introduce you to the development for Windows Mobile 6 Professional, using Visual C#. Windows Mobile 6 has .NET Compact Framework v2 SP2 preinstalled. .NET Compact Framework is a Compact Edition of .NET Framework, and does not have all the features of the complete .NET Framework. Following are the software required for development: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Windows Mobile 6 Professional SDK Refresh (SDK contains emulator, used for testing, debugging. To download click here) ActiveSync (Used for Data Synchronizing between development machine and Windows Mobile, To download click here) Without making any exception, we will follow the golden rule of learning by writing “Hello World” application. Hello World We will assume that you have installed all the prerequisite software mentioned above. Launch Visual Studio 2008 and select Visual C# (if prompted). Create a new Project (File -> New) as shown below: While creating a new Project, Visual Studio 2008 IDE provides an option to select an installed template, which will create Project with all the basic requirements/structure for development. For Windows Mobile, we will select option Smart Device and template Smart Device Project as shown below.  You can also provide: Name: Name for Project. We will call it as MyFirstApp. Location: Location where this project will be created. Browse and set the desired location. We will use default location for now. Solution Name: Name for referring the Solution. Usually we keep it same as Project Name. Since Windows Mobile 6 has .NET Compact Framework v2, it will select the .NET Framework 2.0 from the dropdown on the top right. Click OK. Next step is to select the Target platform, .NET Compact Framework Version and Template. For our application we will select: Target platform: Windows Mobile 6 Professional SDK .NET Compact Framework Version: .NET Compact Framework Version 2.0. Template: Device Application Project MyFirstApp is successfully created and IDE will open a Form as shown. Let me introduce you to the various sections on screen. This is the main section called development section. All the coding and designing of the Form is done here. This section is called Toolbox and lists all the available components. If this section is not visible click View->Toolbox. This section is called Solution Explorer and shows all the forms, resources and properties. If this section is not visible click View->Solution Explorer. This section is Properties and displays all the properties for the component selected. If this section is not visible click View->Properties Window. By default Form is named as Form1. Let us first change the Name of the form. To do so select the form and the properties related to form will be listed in properties window. The entire properties list is in the form of Key Value pair. For changing Name of form, change value of property Name. For this example we will change it to HelloWorldForm. Now this form will be referred as HelloWorldForm throughout the application. Changing form name doesn’t change form caption (title) it is still showing Form1. To change caption change the value of property name Text. For this example we will change the Text to Hello World. Also the file representing this form in Solution Explorer will still be referred as Form1.cs, again you can either keep the name of the file as it is or can rename it. We will rename it to HelloWorld.cs.

This article covers: Basics of a 3D composition in Papervision3D Building your first application Basics of a 3D scene in Papervision3D Before we're ready to program some code for Papervision3D, we need to know a little bit more about 3D in Papervision3D. The following section is meant to give you a better understanding of the code that you will write. Each of these concepts relates directly to classes that are used by Papervision3D. All the object types that will be described are active elements in a 3D scene. Let's have a visualized look at all these objects: Scene The scene is the entire composition of 3D objects in a 3D space. Think of it as your stage in Flash with three axes—x, y, and z. Each object that you want to be visible should be added to the scene. If you don't add objects to the scene, they will not appear on your screen. Camera You can think of this as a real camera, which is somewhere in 3D space recording activity inside the scene. The camera defines the point of view from which you are viewing the scene. Because a camera in 3D is not a visible object, it is not part of our scene and you don't need to add it. Like a real camera you can, for example, zoom and focus. Cameras in 3D space can usually do more than real cameras. For example, in 3D you can, exclude objects to be rendered, when they are too close or too far away from the camera. The camera is able to ignore objects that are not in a certain, defined range. This is done for performance reasons. Objects that are too far away, or even behind the camera, don't need to be recorded, saving a lot of calculation for objects that are in a position where the camera simply can't see them. Viewport A viewport is a container sprite on your stage, and shows the output of what the camera sees. In the illustrative object overview, this has been compared with the lens of the camera. The lens is our window onto the 3D scene. We can make this window small and see just a small part of the scene, or make it big and see a lot. This works exactly as a real window in a wall—making it bigger will not affect how the world outside looks, but will have an effect on how much we can see from this world. The following illustration contains the visualization of a relatively big viewport on the left, along with a relatively small and wide viewport on the right. The thick dark outlines represent the viewports. In the right image, you can clearly see how the window to the 3D world works and how changing its size will not stretch the view of the 3D object in the scene. It only affects how much we see of it. 3D Objects A shape in 3D space is called a 3D object, or DisplayObject3D in Papervision3D. You can think of 3D objects as more advanced display objects just like sprites and movie clips. The difference is that a DisplayObject3D has a third axis, so we can place it anywhere in 3D space and rotate over each of the three axes. Material A material is the texture that is printed on an object. When an object doesn't have a material applied, it will be invisible. There are a variety of materials available for you to use. For example, a very simple material is a color; a more advanced example of a material could be a live streaming video. Render engine A render engine is like a rolling camera. As long as you trigger the render engine, it will output information of the scene recorded by the camera to the viewport. When you stop triggering the render engine, your viewport will not show any new image from the scene and shows the last rendered image. Rendering is actually the most intensive task for your computer, as it needs to recalculate each object that is placed inside your scene and output this to the viewport. Left-handed Cartesian coordinate system Flash, as well as Papervision3D, make use of the Cartesian coordinate system. In Flash, a regular visual object can be positioned on the stage by entering an x and y value. The object will be positioned according to these values and relative to the upper left corner of the stage. A higher x value moves the object to the right, whereas a higher y value moves it downward. The coordinate system in Papervision3D works essentially the same, except for the following two differences: Flash uses Cartesian coordinates on two axes, whereas Papervision3D makes use of them on three axes The y-axis in Flash is inversed compared to the y-axis in Papervision3D In Papervision3D, we want to position objects not only on the x and y axes, but also on an extra axis, in order to position objects in depth. This third axis is called the z-axis. In Flash, objects are positioned relative to the upper left corner, which is the 0, 0 coordinate. This is called the center point, or the origin. Predictably, the position of the origin in 3D space is located at 0, 0, 0. The three axes and the origin point are illustrated by the following image: The plus and minus signs illustrate whether the coordinate values are increasing or decreasing in the direction away from the origin. Notice that the y-axis is inverted compared to 2D coordinates in Flash. When you want to position an object lower on your screen in Flash, you need to give it a higher y position. This is how 2D coordinates on a computer screen work. The above figure shows the y-axis as according to the coordinate system as it is used by Papervision3D. Creating a basic class for Papervision3D In the previous sections you've learned what a basic scene is made of, and how you can create your own classes. Now that we have gone through all this theory, it's now time that we get our hands dirty by writing some code. Start your favorite authoring tool. The first application we'll build is a 3D scene containing a sphere that is rotating over its y-axis. A sphere is basically a "3D ball" and is built into Papervision3D as one of the default primitives. The basic document class First, have a look at the document class that defines the basic structure for the rotating sphere application. package { import flash.display.Sprite; import org.papervision3d.cameras.Camera3D; import org.papervision3d.objects.primitives.Sphere; import org.papervision3d.render.BasicRenderEngine; import org.papervision3d.scenes.Scene3D; import org.papervision3d.view.Viewport3D; public class FirstApplication extends Sprite { private var scene:Scene3D; private var viewport:Viewport3D; private var camera:Camera3D; private var renderEngine:BasicRenderEngine; private var sphere:Sphere; public function FirstApplication() { scene = new Scene3D(); camera = new Camera3D(); sphere = new Sphere(); scene.addChild(sphere); viewport = new Viewport3D(); addChild(viewport); renderEngine = new BasicRenderEngine(); renderEngine.renderScene(scene,camera,viewport); } }} Let's have a look at this in detail. While we do that, you can create a new project in Flash, Flex Builder, or Flash Builder with a document class called FirstApplication. If you're using Flex Builder or Flash Builder, don't forget to configure the path to the Papervision3D source. We know that we need to have a scene, a camera, a viewport, a 3D object with a material, and a render engine, in order to create a rendered output on the screen. Remember that the document class needs to extend Sprite. To make all these available inside the class, we need to import them first. import flash.display.Sprite;import org.papervision3d.cameras.Camera3D;import org.papervision3d.objects.primitives.Sphere;import org.papervision3d.render.BasicRenderEngine;import org.papervision3d.scenes.Scene3D;import org.papervision3d.view.Viewport3D; Now that the imports are set, we define the properties of the class. private var scene:Scene3D;private var viewport:Viewport3D;private var camera:Camera3D;private var renderEngine:BasicRenderEngine;private var sphere:Sphere; We only define the properties and their class types here, without assigning any value. We'll do that inside the constructor. Let's first create the constructor. public function FirstApplication(){} We start by creating a scene inside the constructor. A scene is needed as the holder for our 3D objects. It's very easy to create one. scene = new Scene3D(); All you have to do is create an instance of the Scene3D class, which doesn't take any parameters. Next, we add a Camera3D, which is just as easy as the creation of a new Scene. camera = new Camera3D(); A camera can take parameters when you create a new instance; however, the default values will do for now. The scene and camera are useless as long as there are no 3D objects in the scene to film. For this example a sphere will be used, which is one of the built-in 3D objects. sphere = new Sphere(); A camera, as well as a sphere, takes parameters when you instantiate it. However, when you do not pass any parameters, a default sphere will be created. Now that we have created our sphere, we need to add it to the scene, otherwise it will not be seen by the camera. This works in exactly the same way as adding regular display objects to the display list in Flash, by using the addChild() method. scene.addChild(sphere); That looks familiar, right? Now that we have a scene, a camera, and a sphere, we need to set up the window to the 3D scene, so we can see what is going on in there. We need to define our viewport and add it to the stage to make it visible. viewport = new Viewport3D();addChild(viewport); While creating a new viewport, you can pass optional parameters to it, but the default parameters are again fine for now. We are now just one step away from publishing our application. First we need to get our camera rolling. This is done by defining the render engine, which will render the current view of the camera to the viewport. renderEngine = new BasicRenderEngine();renderEngine.renderScene(scene,camera,viewport); Now that the render engine is defined and an instruction to render the scene is added, we are ready to publish this project. This should result in the following image of triangles that together form something like a circle: Case sensitivityPay attention to upper cases and lower cases in the examples. Not following these conventions might result in an error. A good example of this is the definition and instantiation of a sphere as we did in our FirstApplication.var sphere:Sphere = new Sphere();Here we see that we have defined a class property called sphere (lowercase) of a Sphere (uppercase) type, containing an instance of Sphere (uppercase). Giving a variable/property the same name as the defined object type will often cause problems. The result of these few lines of code may not look very impressive yet, but in fact this is the beginning of something that will soon become exciting and could never be accomplished this easy by regular Flash use. When you have managed to compile this application that shows the triangles, you've made it through the hardest part of this example. Let's continue building your first application and see how we can add the illusion of 3D to our object, which still looks very 2D.

By default, JBoss Tools Palette is available in the Web Development perspective that can be displayed from the Window menu by selecting the Open Perspective | Other option. In the following screenshot, you can see the default look of this palette: Let's dissect this palette to see how it makes our life easier! JBoss Tools Palette Toolbar Note that on the top right corner of the palette, we have a toolbar made of three buttons (as shown in the following screenshot). They are (from left to right): Palette Editor Show/Hide Import Each of these buttons accomplishes different tasks for offering a high level of flexibility and customizability. Next, we will focus our attention on each one of these buttons. Palette Editor Clicking on the Palette Editor icon will display the Palette Editor window (as shown in the following screenshot), which contains groups and subgroups of tags that are currently supported. Also, from this window you can create new groups, subgroups, icons, and of course, tags—as you will see in a few moments. As you can see, this window contains two panels: one for listing groups of tag libraries (left side) and another that displays details about the selected tag and allows us to modify the default values (extreme right). Modifying a tag is a very simple operation that can be done like this: Select from the left panel the tag that you want to modify (for example, the <div> tag from the HTML | Block subgroup, as shown in the previous screenshot). In the right panel, click on the row from the value column that corresponds to the property that you want to modify (the name column). Make the desirable modification(s) and click the OK button for confirming it (them). Creating a set of icons The Icons node from the left panel allows you to create sets of icons and import new icons for your tags. To start, you have to right-click on this node and select the Create | Create Set option from the contextual menu (as shown in the following screenshot). This action will open the Add Icon Set window where you have to specify a name for this new set. Once you're done with the naming, click on the Finish button (as shown in the following screenshot). For example, we have created a set named eHTMLi: Importing an icon You can import a new icon in any set of icons by right-clicking on the corresponding set and selecting the Create | Import Icon option from the contextual menu (as shown in the following screenshot): This action will open the Add Icon window, where you have to specify a name and a path for your icon, and then click on the Finish button (as shown in the following screenshot). Note that the image of the icon should be in GIF format. Creating a group of tag libraries As you can see, the JBoss Tools Palette has a consistent default set of groups of tag libraries, like HTML, JSF, JSTL, Struts, XHTML, etc. If these groups are insufficient, then you can create new ones by right-clicking on the Palette node and selecting the Create | Create Group option from the contextual menu (as shown in the following screenshot). This action will open the Create Group window, where you have to specify a name for the new group, and then click on Finish. For example, we have created a group named mygroup: Note that you can delete (only groups created by the user) or edit groups (any group) by selecting the Delete or Edit options from the contextual menu that appears when you right-click on the chosen group. Creating a tag library Now that we have created a group, it's time to create a library (or a subgroup). To do this, you have to right-click on the new group and select the Create Group option from the contextual menu (as shown in the following screenshot). This action will open the Add Palette Group window, where you have to specify a name and an icon for this library, and then click on the Finish button (as shown in the following screenshot). As an example, we have created a library named eHTML with an icon that we had imported in the Importing an icon section discussed earlier in this article: Note that you can delete a tag library (only tag libraries created by the user) by selecting the Delete option from the contextual menu that appears when you right-click on the chosen library.

Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.-Ralph Waldo Emerson Many of the patterns and capabilities shown in this article are compatible with the last few versions of the BizTalk Server product. So what's new in BizTalk Server 2009?` BizTalk Server 2009 is the sixth formal release of the BizTalk Server product. This upcoming release has a heavy focus on platform modernization through new support for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio.NET 2008, SQL Server 2008, and the .NET Framework 3.5. This will surely help developers who have already moved to these platforms in their day-to-day activities but have been forced to maintain separate environments solely for BizTalk development efforts. Lets get started. What is the WCF SQL Adapter? The BizTalk Adapter Pack 2.0 now contains five system and data adapters including SAP, Siebel, Oracle databases, Oracle applications, and SQL Server. What are these adapters and how are they different than the adapters available for previous version of BizTalk? Up until recently, BizTalk adapters were built using a commonly defined BizTalk Adapter Framework. This framework prescribed interfaces and APIs for adapter developers in order to elicit a common look and feel for the users of the adapters. Moving forward, adapter developers are encouraged by Microsoft to use the new WCF LOB Adapter SDK. As you can guess from the name, this new adapter framework, which can be considered an evolution of the BizTalk Adapter Framework, is based on WCF technologies. All of the adapters in the BizTalk Adapter Pack 2.0 are built upon the WCF LOB Adapter SDK. What this means is that all of the adapters are built as reusable, metadata-rich components that are surfaced to users as WCF bindings. So much like you have a wsHttp or netTcp binding, now you have a sqlBinding or sapBinding. As you would expect from a WCF binding, there is a rich set of configuration attributes for these adapters and they are no longer tightly coupled to BizTalk itself. Microsoft has made connection a commodity, and no longer do organizations have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to connect to line of business systems like SAP through expensive, BizTalk-only adapters. This latest version of the BizTalk Adapter Pack now includes a SQL Server adapter, which replaces the legacy BizTalk-only SQL Server adapter. What do we get from this SQL Server adapter that makes it so much better than the old one? Feature Classic SQL Adapter WCF SQL Adapter Execute create-read-update-delete statements on tables and views; execute stored procedures and generic T-SQL statements Partial (send operations only support stored procedures and updategrams) Yes Database polling via FOR XML Yes Yes Database polling via  traditional tabular results No Yes Proactive database push via SQL Query Notification No Yes Expansive adapter configuration which impacts connection management and transaction behavior No Yes Support for composite transactions which allow aggregation of operations across tables or procedures into a single atomic transaction No Yes Rich metadata browsing and retrieval for finding and selecting database operations No Yes Support for the latest data types (e.g. XML) and SQL Server 2008 platform No Yes Reusable outside of BizTalk applications by WCF or basic HTTP clients No Yes Adapter extension and configuration through out of the box WCF components or custom WCF behaviors No Yes Dynamic WSDL generation which always reflects current state of the system instead of fixed contract which always requires explicit updates No Yes

This article covers the following: Introduction to classes and object-oriented programming Working with the document class/main application file Introduction to classes and object-oriented programming In this article we will learn to write our own classes that can be used in Flash, along with Flex Builder and Flash Builder. If you're a developer using the Flash IDE, it might be the first time you'll write your own classes. Don't worry about the difficulty level if you are new to classes. Learning how to program  in an OOP way using Papervision3D is a good way to become more familiar with classes and it  might motivate you to learn more about this subject. You will not be the first who learned to program in an OOP way, as a side effect of learning an external library such as Papervision3D is. So what are classes? In fact, they are nothing more than a set of functions (methods) and variables (properties) grouped together in a single file, which is known as the class definition. A class forms the blueprint for new objects that you create. Sounds a bit vague? What if you were told that you've probably already used classes? Each object you create from the Flash API is based on classes. For example, Sprites, MovieClips, and TextFields are objects that you have probably used in your code before. In fact, these objects are classes. The blueprints for these objects and their classes are already incorporated in Flash. First, have a look at how you can use them to create a new Sprite object: var mySprite:Sprite = new Sprite(); Looks familiar—right? By doing this, you create a new copy of the Sprite class as an object called mySprite. This is called instantiation of an object. There's no difference between instantiating built-in classes or instantiating custom written classes. Papervision3D is a set of custom classes. var myObject3D:DisplayObject3D = new DisplayObject3D(); So, although you know how to use classes, creating your own classes might be new to you. Creating a custom class An ActionScript class is basically a text-based file with an .as extension stored somewhere on your computer, containing ActionScript code. This code works as the previously mentioned blueprint for an object. Let's see what that blueprint looks like: package { public class ExampleClass { public var myName:String = "Paul"; public function ExampleClass() { } public function returnMyName():String { return "My name is" + myName; } }} On the first line, you'll find the package statement, followed by an opening curly bracket and ended with a closing curly bracket at the bottom of the class. Packages are a way to group classes together and represent the folder in which you saved the file. Imagine you have created a folder called myPackage inside the same folder where you've saved an FLA or inside a defined source folder. In order to have access to the folder and its classes, you will need to define the package using the folder's name as shown next: package myPackage { ...} This works the same way for subfolders. Let's imagine a folder called subPackage has been added to the imaginary folder myPackage. The package definition for classes inside this subfolder should then look like this: package myPackage.subPackage { ...} If you don't create a special folder to group your classes, you can use the so-called default package instead of defining a name. All the examples in this article will use default packages. However, for real projects it's good practice to set up a structure in order to organize your files. After the package definition, you'll find the class definition, which looks as follows: public class ExampleClass{ ...} The name of the class must be the same name as the class file. In this example, the file needs to be saved as ExampleClass.as. Besides the fact that working packages is a good way to organize your files, they can also be used to uniquely identify each class in a project. At the top of the class definition you'll see the word public, which is a keyword defining that the class is accessible to all other code in the project. This keyword is called, an access modifier. The defined name of the class will be used to instantiate new copies of the class. Instantiating this class could be done like this: var classExample:ExampleClass = new ExampleClass(); Inside the class, a string variable is defined in pretty much the same way as you would when working with timeline scripting. public var myName:String = "Paul"; The definition of a variable inside a class is called as a class property. You can add as many properties to a class as you want. Each definition starts off with an access modifier. In this case the access modifier is set to public, meaning that it is both readable and writeable by code located outside the class: var classExample:ExampleClass = new ExampleClass();classExample.myName = "Jeff"; As you can see, this creates an instance of ExampleClass. We also changed the myName property from Paul to Jeff. When a property is defined as public, this is allowed to happen. In case you want access to this property inside the class itself, you can mark the property as private: private var myName:String = "Paul"; Executing the previous code to change myName from Paul to Jeff will result in a compile-time error. In the next lines we see the creation of a new function called ExampleClass in the class. Functions that have the same name as the name of the class are known as constructors. public function ExampleClass(){} Constructors always have a public access modifier and are called automatically each time the class is instantiated. This means that the code inside this function will be executed automatically. All other function definitions inside the class are called methods. public function returnMyName():String{ return "My name is" + myName;} At the end of this method definition, you'll notice a colon followed by a data type. This defines the type of object the method returns. When you work with functions on the timeline in Flash, you can define this as well, but it's not required to do so. The method returnMyName() is defined to return a string. In case you do not want to return any data type, you can define this by using a void as the return type: public function returnNothing():void{ //Do not return something} We need to define return type only for methods and not for constructors. Classes, as well as properties and methods, have access modifiers that define from where each of these objects can be accessed. So far we've seen that a public keyword allows code outside the class to access a property, or call a method inside the class. When you allow access from other code, you need to be aware that this code can mess up your class. You can prevent this by using the private keyword, which makes the property or method only accessible inside your class. Two other access modifiers that are often used are internal and protected. Classes inside the same package can access internal methods or properties and protected methods can only be used inside a related subclass. Subclasses are a part of inheritance, which will be explained in a bit. As long as you have not planned to give access to scripts outside your class, it's a good practice to mark all properties and methods of a class as private by default. When defining a property or method, you should always ask yourself whether you want them to be accessed from outside your class.