How-To Tutorials

An interesting feature of a PBX is the ability to support multiple dial plans, meaning that you are able to create various dial-plan logics, associate different calling rules to each dial plan, and assign users to specific dial plan. Schematically speaking, the relation between the three can be illustrated as follows: Essentially, from AsteriskNOW's point of view, any dial attempt that doesn't match a Calling Rule will be considered an internal call, and thus, AsteriskNOW will try to route the call to an internal AsteriskNOW resource—e.g. another extension or an AsteriskNOW feature code. Most telephony engineers and carrier support engineers refer to "Calling Rules" as "Routing Rules". From this point onwards in the book "Calling Rules" will be referred to as "Routing Rules". Managing Routing Rules with AsteriskNOW At this point, after initially configuring your service providers and initial routing rules, your "Routing Rules" table should look as follows: Edit one of these rules to get acquainted with the call rule dialog box. Click the Edit link of the all_outbound rule (rule 1). The following dialog box should appear on your screen: Every call made from an IP phone connected to the PBX is processed by the routing rules. The processing is performed in the following order: AsteriskNOW grabs the dialed number and tries to match it to the prefix defined in the Routing Rule. In this dialog, the prefix is 9. It then verifies the number of digits suffixing the prefix. In this example, any number of digits that is 3 or more is considered a valid number to be assigned to this route. Now, before actually routing the call to the designated service provider, AsteriskNOW can remove prefixes and/or prefix numbers to the dialed number. In this example it will only remove a single prefixing digit (9) and then pass the call to your service provider–Ports 1,2,3. The above process happens for every call that is made by a phone connected to the PBX. If the process fails all the rules defined in the Routing Table, AsteriskNOW assumes that the call is supposed to be routed internally. If internal routing fails, the call will fail and a fast-busy tone will be heard from your IP phone. Some IP phones also indicate the SIP error message that was received. If routing fails, the normal error that you may encounter would be error 404 – NOT FOUND. Manually Editing Dial-Plan Logic Additional information about Asterisk configuration filesWhile this book deals with AsteriskNOW—aimed to provide a simple, fast solution for managing the Asterisk Open Source PBX—it does so without getting into the inner workings of Asterisk's configuration files. Additional information about the configuration files, their format, usage, and various available options is available at the voip-info wiki, located at: http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+config+files. Manually editing AsteriskNOW dial-plan files isn't recommended; however, in some extreme situations it can't be avoided (especially while creating special applications with AsteriskNOW). For this specific reason, AsteriskNOW includes a facility to edit the configuration files manually. Click the File Editor menu option; the following screen should appear:   The extensions.conf file should interest you. Using the drop-down file selector, select the extensions.conf file for editing. The following screen should be observed: Now, if you were to click one of the lightly-shaded areas (light green on your screen); a text editing box will open to enable you to edit the file. You're probably wondering at this point—"where is routing logic located?" Scroll down the file and seek the section designated as numberplan-custom-1, which designates your DialPlan1 dial plan. If you were to create an additional dial plan using the GUI, its designation in the extensions.conf file would be numberplan-custom-2. Examine the following section: In the above section lines indicated by the exten directive, indicate a dial-plan activity. The exten directive is then followed by some form of well formatted number string, followed by a number indicating the sequence number of the directive, then followed by an Asterisk operational command—in our case, the Macro command. Asterisk and AsteriskNOW include over 150 different applications; explanation of each and every application is beyond the scope of this book. Visit the Asterisk Wiki page at http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/index.php?page=Asterisk for more information about Asterisk and AsteriskNOW applications. The way the dial plan analyzes dialed numbers is explained next. Consider one of the dialing rules: exten=_9XXX!,1,Macro(trunkdial,${trunk_1}/${EXTEN:1}) The interesting portion of this line is the _9XXX!. The following is an extract from an Asterisk documentation: ; Extension names may be numbers, letters, or combinations; thereof. If an extension name is prefixed by a ‘_'; character, it is interpreted as a pattern rather than a; literal. In patterns, some characters have special meanings:;; X - any digit from 0-9; Z - any digit from 1-9; N - any digit from 2-9; [1235-9] - any digit in the brackets (in this example, 1,2,3,5,6,7,8,9); . - wildcard, matches anything remaining (e.g. _9011. matches; anything starting with 9011 excluding 9011 itself); ! - wildcard, causes the matching process to complete as soon as; it can unambiguously determine that no other matches are possible;; For example the extension _NXXXXXX would match normal 7 digit dialings,; while _1NXXNXXXXXX would represent an area code plus phone number; preceded by a one.;; Each step of an extension is ordered by priority, which must; always start with 1 to be considered a valid extension. The priority; "next" or "n" means the previous priority plus one, regardless of whether; the previous priority was associated with the current extension or not.; The priority "same" or "s" means the same as the previously specified; priority, again regardless of whether the previous entry was for the; same extension. Priorities may be immediately followed by a plus sign; and another integer to add that amount (most useful with ‘s' or ‘n').; Priorities may then also have an alias, or label, in; parenthesis after their name which can be used in goto situations As this text suggest, the underscore marking (_) indicates the start of a pattern matching rule. This is then followed by a form of expression indicating the pattern to match. In the example, the pattern match is _9XXX!, so, interpreting this according to the documentation: _9: Indicates any number that is prefixed with the digit 9. This corresponds to the first routing rule. XXX: Indicates 3 digits, ranging from 0 to 9. This corresponds to the second portion of the routing rule. !: Indicates to match as soon as there is no other rule that may apply, thus closing the matching process. For example, in accordance to the above points, the number 912345 will match the rule indicated above and will simply activate the Macro application. However, bearing in mind that the routing requires at least 3 digits to follow the prefix, the number 912 will not match our above routing rule. At this point, the working of the Macro application is not explained; however, the empirical knowledge of its existence is enough. Summary In this article you learned what routing rules are and how they are processed within the AsteriskNOW operational model. Understanding the way routing rules work is imperative to configure your PBX for optimal usage of outbound connections.

Let's look at the default theme (garland) and customize it. We can customize the following features: Color scheme, either based on a color set, or by changing the individual colors If certain elements, such as the logo, are displayed The logo The favicon Back in the Themes section of the Administer area, there is a configure link next to each theme; if we click this we are taken to the theme's configuration page. Although Doug ideally wants a new theme that is unique to his website, he also wants to have a look at a few different options for the default theme. In particular, he wants to add his company's logo to the website and try a number of red color schemes as those are his corporate colors. Color Scheme The color scheme settings are quite intuitive and easy to change. We can either: Select a color set Change each color by entering the hexadecimal color codes (the # followed by 6 characters) Select the colors from the color wheel To change a color using the color wheel, we need to click on the color type (base color, link color, etc.) to select it and then chose the general color from the wheel and the shade of the color from the square within. When we change the colors or color set, the preview window below the settings automatically updates to reflect the color change. The following color sets are available: Blue Lagoon (the default set) Ash Aquamarine Belgian Chocolate Bluemarine Citrus Blast Cold Day Greenbeam Meditarrano Mercury Nocturnal Olivia Pink Plastic Shiny Tomato Teal Top Custom Quite a number of these are red-based color schemes, let's look into them, they are: Belgian Chocolate Meditarrano Shiny Tomato Belgian Chocolate Color Set The Belgian Chocolate color set uses a dark red header with a gradient starting with black flowing into a dark red color. The page's background is a cream color and the main content area has a white background as illustrated by the picture below: Mediterrano Color Set The Mediterrano color set uses a lighter red color where the gradient in the header starts with a light orange color which then flows into a light red color. Similar to the Belgian Chocolate color scheme the background is cream in color with a white background for the content area. Shiny Tomato Color Set The Shiny Tomato color set has a gradient header that starts with deep red and flows into a bright red color. The page's background is light grey with white background for the main content area, reflecting a professional image. The Shiny Tomato color set uses a red scheme which is in Doug's logo and he feels this set is the most professional of the three and wants us to use that.  

Let's get started. Do you want a CMS or a portal? We are evaluating a CMS for our Yoga Site. But you may want to build something else. Take a look again at the requirements. Do you need a lot of dynamic modules such as an event calendar, shopping cart, collaboration module, file downloads, social networking, and so on? Or you need modules for publishing and organizing content such as news, information, articles, and so on? Today's top-of-the-line Web CMSs can easily work as a portal. They either have a lot of built-in functionality or a wide range of plug-ins that extend their core features. Yet, there are solutions specifically made for web portals. You should evaluate them along with CMS software if your needs are more like a portal. On the other hand, if you want a simple corporate or personal web site, with some basic needs, you don't require a mammoth CMS. You can use a simple CMS that will not only fulfill your needs, but will also be easier to learn and maintain. Joomla! is a solid CMS. But it requires some experience to get used to it. For this article, let's first evaluate a simpler CMS. How do we know which CMS is simple? I think we can't go wrong with a CMS that's named "CMS Made Simple". Evaluating CMS Made Simple As the name suggests, CMS Made Simple (http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/) is an easy-to-learn and easy-to-maintain CMS. Here's an excerpt from its home page: If you are an experienced web developer, and know how to do the things you need to do, to get a site up with CMS Made Simple is just that, simple. For those with more advanced ambitions there are plenty of addons to download. And there is an excellent community always at your service. It's very easy to add content and addons wherever you want them to appear on the site. Design your website in whatever way or style you want and just load it into CMSMS to get it in the air. Easy as that! That makes things very clear. CMSMS seems to be simple for first-time users, and extensible for developers. Let's take CMSMS to a test drive. Time for action-managing content with CMS Made Simple Download and install CMS Made Simple. Alternatively, go to the demo a thttp://www.opensourcecms.com/. Log in to the administration section. Click on Content | Image Manager. Using the Upload File option, upload the Yoga Site logo. Click on Content | Pages option from the menu. You will see a hierarchical listing of current pages on the site. The list is easy to understand. Let's add a new page by clicking on the Add NewContent link above the list. The content addition screen is similar to a lot of other CMSs we have seen so far.There are options to enter page title, category, and so on. You can add page content using a large WYSIWYG editor. Notice that we can select a template for the page. We can also select a parent page.Since we want this page to appear at the root level, keep the Parent as none. Add some Yoga background information text. Format it using the editor as you see fit. There are two new options on this editor, which are indicated by the orange palmtree icons. These are two special options that CMSMS has added: first, to insert a menu; and second, to add a link to another page on the site. This is excellent. It saves us the hassle of remembering, or copying, links. Select a portion of text in the editor. Click on the orange palm icon with the link symbol on it. Select any page from the fly out menu. For now, we will link to the Home page. Click on the Insert/edit Image icon. Then click on the Browse icon next to the ImageURL field in the new window that appears. Select the logo we uploaded and insert it into content. Click on Submit to save the page. The Current Pages listing now shows our Background page. Let's bring it higher in the menu hierarchy. Click on the up arrow in the Move column on our page to push it higher. Do this until is at the second position—just after Home. That's all. We can click on the magnifying glass icon at the main menu bar's rightside to preview our site. Here's how it looks. What just happened? We set up the CMSMS and added some content to it. We wanted to use an image in ourcontent page. To make things simpler, we first uploaded an image. Then we went to the current pages listing. CMSMS shows all pages in the site in a hierarchical display. It's a simplefeature that makes a content administrator's life very easy. From there, we went on to createa new page. CMSMS has a WYSIWYG editor, like so many other CMSs we have seen till now. The content addition process is almost the same in most CMSs. Enter page title and related information,type in content, and you can easily format it using a WYSIWYG editor. We inserted the logo image uploaded earlier using this editor. CMSMS features extensions to the default WYSIWYG editor. These features demonstrate all of the thinking that's gone into making this software. The orange palm tree icon appearing on the WYSIWYG editor toolbar allowed us to insert a link to another page with a simple click. We could also insert a dynamic menu from within the editor if needed. Saving and previewing our site was equally easy. Notice how intuitive it is to add and manage content. CMS Made Simple lives up to its namein this process. It uses simple terms and workflow to accomplish tasks at hand. Check out the content administration process while you evaluate a CMS. After all, it's going to be your most commonly used feature! Hierarchies: How deep do you need them?What level of content hierarchies do you need? Are you happy with two levels? Do you like Joomla!'s categories -> sections -> content flow ? Or do you need to go even deeper? Most users will find two levels sufficient. But if you need more, find out if the CMS supports it. (Spoiler: Joomla! is only two-level deepby default.) Now that we have learned about the content management aspect of CMSMS, let's see how easily we can customize it. It has some interesting features we can use. Time for action-exploring customization options Look around the admin section. There are some interesting options. The third item in the Content menu is Global Content Blocks. Click on it. The name suggests that we can add content that appears on all pages of the site from there. A footer block is already defined. Our Yoga Site can get some revenue by selling interesting products. Let's create a block to promote some products on our site. Click on the Add Global Content Block link at the bottom. Let's use product as the name. Enter some text using the editor. Click on Submit to save. Our new content block will appear in the list. Select and copy Tag to Use this Block. Logically, we need to add this tag in a template. Select Layout | Templates from the main menu. If you recall, we are using the Left simple navigation + 1 column template. Click on the template name. This shows a template editor. Looking at this code we can make out the structure of a content page. Let's add the new content block tag after the main page content. Paste the tag just after the {* End relational links *} text. The tag is something like this. Save the template. Now preview the site. Our content block shows up after mainpage content as we wanted. Job done! What just happened? We used the global content block feature of CMSMS to insert a product promotion throughout our site. In the process, we learned about templates and also how we could modify them. Creating a global content block was similar to adding a new content page. We used the WYSIWYG editor to enter content block text. This gave us a special tag. If you know about PHP templates, you will have guessed that CMSMS uses Smarty templates and the tag was simply a custom tag in Smarty. Smarty Template EngineSmarty (http://www.smarty.net/) is the most popular template engine for the PHP programming language. Smarty allows keeping core PHP code and presentation/HTML code separate. Special tags are inserted in template files as placeholders for dynamic content. Visit http://www.smarty.net/crashcourse.php and http://www.packtpub.com/smarty/book for more. Next, we found the template our site was using. We could tell it by name, since the template shows up in a drop down in the add new pages screen as well. We opened the template and reviewed it. It was simple to understand—much like HTML. We inserted our product content block tag after the main content display. Then we saved it and previewed our site. Just as expected, the product promotion content showed up after main content of all pages. This shows how easy it is to add global content using CMSMS. But we also learned that global content blocks can help us manage promotions or commonly used content. Even if you don't go for CMS Made Simple, you can find a similar feature in the CMS of your choice. Simple features can make life easierCMS Made Simple's Global Content Block feature made it easy to run product promotions throughout a site. A simple feature like that can make the content administrator's life easier. Look out for such simple things that could make your job faster and easier in the CMS you evaluate. It's good time now to dive deeper into CMSMS. Go ahead and see whether it's the right choice for you. Have a go hero-is it right for you? CMS Made Simple (CMSMS) looks very promising. If we wanted to build a standard website with a photo gallery, newsletter, and so on, it is a perfect fit. Its code structure is understandable, the extending functionality is not too difficult. The default templates could be more appealing, but you can always create your own. The gentle learning curve of CMSMS is very impressive. The hierarchical display of pages,easy reordering, and simplistic content management approach are excellent. It's simple to figure out how things work. Yet CMSMS is a powerful system—remember how easily we could add a global content block? Doing something like that may need writing a plug-in or hacking source code in most other systems. It's the right time for you to see how it fits your needs. Take a while and evaluate the following: Does it meet your feature requirements? Does it have enough modules and extensions for your future needs? What does its web site say? Does it align with your vision and philosophy? Does it look good enough? Check out the forums and support structure. Do you see an active community? What are its system requirements? Do you have it all taken care of? If you are going to need customizations, do you (or your team) comfortably understand the code? We are done evaluating a simple CMS. Let us now look at the top two heavyweights in the Web CMS world—Drupal and Joomla!. Diving into Drupal Drupal (http://www.drupal.org) is a top open source Web CMS. Drupal has been around for years and has excellent architecture, code quality, and community support. The Drupal terminology can take time to sink in. But it can serve the most complicated content management needs. FastCompany and AOL's Corporate site work on Drupal:  Here is the About Drupal section on the Drupal web site. As you can see, Drupal can be used for almost all types of content management needs. The goal is to allow easy publishing and management of a wide variety of content. Let's try out Drupal. Let's understand how steep the learning curve really is, and why so many people swear by Drupal. Time for action-putting Drupal to the test Download and install Drupal. Installing Drupal involves downloading the latest stable release, extracting and uploading files to your server, setting up a database, and then following the instructions in a web installer. Refer to http://drupal.org/getting-started/ if you need help. Log in as the administrator. As you log in, you see a link to Create Content. This tells you that you can either create a page (simple content page) or a story (content with comments). We want to create a simple content page without any comments. So click on Page. In Drupal, viewing a page and editing a page are almost the same. You log in to Drupal and see site content in a preview mode. Depending on your rights, you will see links to edit content and manage other options. This shows the Create Page screen. There is a title but no WYSIWYG editor. Yes, Drupal does not come with a WYSIWYG text editor by default. You have to install an extension module for this. Let's go ahead and do that first. Go to the Drupal web site. Search for WYSIWYG in downloads. Find TinyMCE in the list. TinyMCE is the WYSIWYG editor we have seen in most other CMSs. Download the latest TinyMCE module for Drupal—compatible with your version of Drupal. The download does not include the actual TinyMCE editor. It only includes hooks tomake the editor work with Drupal. Go to the TinyMCE web site http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/download.php. Download the latest version. Create a new folder called modules in the sites/all/ folder of Drupal. This is theplace to store all custom modules. Extract the TinyMCE Drupal module here. It should create a folder named tinymcewithin the modules folder. Extract the TinyMCE editor within this folder. This creates a subfolder called tinymce within sites/all/modules/tinymce. Make sure the files are in the correct folders. Here's how your structure will look: Log in to Drupal if you are not already logged in. Go toAdminister | Site building | Modules. If all went well so far, at the end of the list of modules, you will find TinyMCE. Check the box next to it and click on Save Configuration to enable it. We need to perform two more steps before we can test this. Go to Administer |Site configuration | TinyMCE. It will prompt you that you don't have any profiles created. Create a new profile. Keep it enabled by default. Go to Administer | User management | Permissions. You will get this link from theTinyMCE configuration page too. Allow authenticated users to access tinymce. Then save permissions. We are now ready to test. Go to the Create Content | Page link. Super! The shiny WYSIWYG editor is now functional! It shows editing controls belowthe text area (all the other CMSs we saw so far show the controls above). Go ahead and add some content. Make sure to check Full HTML in Input Format.Save the page. You will see the content we entered right after you save it. Congratulations! What just happened? We deserve congratulations. After installing Drupal, we spotted that it did not come with a WYSIWYG editor. That's a bit of a setback. Drupal claims to be lightweight, but it should come with a nice editor, right? There are reasons for not including an editor by default. Drupal can be used for a variety of needs, and different WYSIWYG editors provide different features. The reason for not including any editor is to allow you to use the one that you feel is the best. Drupal is about a strong core and flexibility. At the same time, not getting a WYSIWYG editor by default was an opportunity. It was our opportunity to see how easy it was to add a plug-in to Drupal. We went to the Drupal site and found the TinyMCE module. The description of the module mentioned that the module is only a hook to TinyMCE. We need to download TinyMCE separately. We did that too. Hooks are another strength of Drupal. They are an easy way to develop extensions for Drupal. An additional function of modules is to ensure that we download a version compatible with Drupal's version. Mismatched Drupal and module versions create problems. We created a new directory within sites/all. This is the directory in which all custom modules/extensions should be stored. We extracted the module and TinyMCE ZIP files. We then logged on to the Drupal administration panel. Drupal had detected the module. We enabled it and configured it. The configuration process was multi step. Drupal has a very good access privilege system, but that made the configuration process longer. We not only had to enable the module, but also enable it for users. We also configured how it should show up, and in which sections. These are superb features for power users. Once all this was done, we could see a WYSIWYG editor in the content creation page. We used it and created a new page in Drupal. Here are the lessons we learned: Don't assume a feature in the CMS. Verify if that CMS has what you need. Drupal's module installation and configuration process is multistep and may require some looking around. Read the installation instructions of the plug-in. You will make fewer mistakes that way. Drupal is lightweight and is packed with a lot of power. But it has a learning curve of its own. With those important lessons in our mind, let's look around Drupal and figure out our way. Have a go hero-figure out your way with Drupal We just saw what it takes to get a WYSIWYG editor working with Drupal. This was obviously not a simple plug-and-play setup! Drupal has its way of doing things. If you are planning to use Drupal, it's a good time to go deeper and figure your way out with Drupal. Try out the following: Create a book with three chapters. Create a mailing list and send out one newsletter. Configure permissions and users according to your requirements. What if you wanted to customize the homepage? How easily can you do this? (Warning: It's not a simple operation with most CMSs.) Choosing a CMS is very confusing!Evaluating and choosing a CMS can be very confusing. Don't worry if you feel lost and confused among all the CMSs and their features. The guiding factors should always be your requirements, not the CMS's features. Figure out who's going to use the CMS—developers or end users. Find out all you need: Do you need to allow customizing the homepage? Know your technology platform. Check the code quality of the CMS—bad code can gag you. Does your site need so many features? Is the CMS only good looking, or is it beauty with brains? Consider all this in your evaluation. Drupal code quality Drupal's code is very well-structured. It's easy to understand and extend it via the hooks mechanism. The Drupal team takes extreme care in producing good code. Take a look at the sample code here. If you like looking around code, go ahead and peek into Drupal. Even if you don't use Drupal as a CMS, you can learn more about programming best practices. Now let's do a quick review and see some interesting Joomla! features.

Introduction WPF, an acronym for Windows Presentation Foundation is a subsystem of class libraries for WinFX and it enables the user to get a richer experience bringing together UI, Documents, media etc. A XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) file which is at the heart of a WPF project can be created in several ways that includes the Notepad text editor, the Expression Blend which requires another download from Microsoft, but may not provide a easy to use XAML file to use in VS, and the Visual Studio editions except the express edition. XAML is presently specific to windows platform and is a XML formatting language and not an application programming interface. I will be mostly showing how to get some hands-on experience with a WPF project using the Visual Studio 2005 interface and the template files that you may access with the Windows SDK installed. Creating a WPF Project From File | New | Project click open the New Project window as shown in the next figure. Click on Visual Basic and expand its contents. Under .NET 3.0 FrameWork (It is assumed that you have installed NET 3.0 Framework) choose the Windows Application (WPF). Now highlight the Windows Application (WPF) and change the name of the application to some name of your choice. For this article it is changed to AppWPF. Click on the OK button after typing a name of your choice. This creates the necessary file/folders for the application as shown in the next figure. There are two XAML files created in the project. The App.xaml and the Windows1.xaml file. Delete the Windows1.xaml and add a new item as shown with the name BasicControls.xaml. With this new item added you may need to change the App.xaml file as shown below. <Application x_Class="App" StartupUri="BasicControls.xaml"> <Application.Resources> </Application.Resources> </Application> The StartupUri has been changed from the original Windows1.xaml to BasicControls.xaml. With this change made you can now display the BasicControls.xaml file together with its design as shown in the next figure. This represents a 300 X 300 window which can be used as a container for other controls. You also notice the reference to the namespaces that are required and the XML syntax with the attribute of the project for the window. Placing Controls on the Window Placing Controls automatically creates XAML code. Placing controls on this window is as easy as dragging from the Tools and dropping on to this window. The next picture shows a button and a textbox dragged and dropped onto this window. The necessary code for these controls gets automatically added as the controls are placed. After the two controls are added, the xaml file gets changed as shown. The Button and Textbox properties are the defaults which may be modified as will be seen later in the article. <Window x_Class="BasicControls" Title="AppWPF" Height="300" Width="300" > <Grid> <Button Height="23" Margin="94,0,123,39" Name="Button1" VerticalAlignment="Bottom">Button</Button> <TextBox HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="43, 126, 0,115" Name="TextBox1" Width="100"></TextBox> </Grid> </Window> Adding code automatically updates the window design. Inserting a declarative code into the BasicControls.xaml file will automatically add the control defined by that code to the design window. Add this code to the xaml file after as shown in the next paragraph. As soon as you type "<", the intellisense gets fired up and you will see a drop-down list of items that you can insert as shown in the next figure. Now you click on the Textbox (or whatever else you wish to place). This adds to the xaml file. Now to the opening tag of the textbox, you add a name attribute and call it TextBox2. Intellisense is also used in adding attributes as you will get a context sensitive listing of attributes for the chosen control. Also add other attributes such as width, height, alignment etc. With the code added as shown in the next paragraph you will see that the design pane has a new textbox as shown in the next figure.   <Textbox Name="TextBox2" Height="20" Margin="89.5,96.5,0,0" VerticalAlignment="Top" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Width="50"></TextBox*gt; The property window for the TextBox2 shown can also be used to make changes. You can also move, or adjust the dimensions of the controls using the mouse. The various controls provide a very rich interface for the designer in manipulating the controls. Event Handling All 'Hello World' programs used a button click to demonstrate the workings of the code or how the events were handled. In this tutorial also you will demonstrate the click event along the same lines. In the Solution Explorer only a few items are seen but there are lot more files in the project. Click on the middle toolbar just above the project as shown in the next figure. This will allow you to see all the files / folders in the project displayed (every folder expanded out) as shown. This is vastly different from a legacy windows project. The references to the Presentation Foundation are all in the three references, PresentationCore, PresentationDesignDeveloper and PresentationDesignFramework. In order to appreciate the rich designer support you have to go to the ,Object Browser and look at the references. For example just the PresentationCore has the following namespaces shown in the next figure. The BasicControls.xaml file also has the code behind file, BasicControls.xaml.vb, as shown in the next figure. In the code page, the drop-down control displaying BasicControls presently has all the objects on this window listed in its menu. You can find the Button as well. With the button chosen you can use the second drop-down to access all the events of the Button in the second drop-down (presently showing Declarations). In this manner the button click event was chosen from the second drop-down. Here the Button1_Click has been set to display "Click is registered" in Textbox1 when the button is clicked. You can find the reference to this in the Object Browser as shown in the next figure. Object Browser is an extremely valuable resource that you should seek out to understand the underlying logic, the arguments of a function call, etc. When you build and execute the program and click on the button this is what you will see displayed. The top part is the design window and the bottom is the window when clicked. At this point you might be wondering how to improve the look and feel. Indeed the form looks drab since none of the properties have been used except for the most basic. The next figure shows how you may change the appearance by inserting the property attributes directly into the XMAL file. You will be better off using the intellisense rather than trying to guess the property based on your previous 'Windows' experience as shown in the next figure. You may also add attributes from the property window of the object which you can view when the object is highlighted (or clicked) in the design pane. The variety of attributes is just too many and when in doubt you will be able to drill down to the one you want to use in the Object Browser. The next code listing shows a few more attributes added to the Textbox1. As you might have seen in the intellisense pop-up windows, there is a large number of properties that you can tweak and events that you can trigger. Notice the [.] notation for the TextElement in the code listing, FontFamily being the child of the parent TextElement. Listing 1 <TextBox HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="43,126,0,115" Name="TextBox1" Width="150" TextElement.FontFamily="Times Roman" ToolTip="Xaml TextBox" FontWeight="Bold" AutoWordSelection="True" Foreground="BlueViolet" Background="Aquamarine" TextDecorations="Underline" > </TextBox> When the program is executed you will see the following displayed. Summary The article describes the steps to create a WPF project. The Design <-->Declarative Code interactivity is also described. The placing of controls and adding event handling code to the code behind page is explained with an example. While testing the "AutoWordSelection" did not function as it should by its definition. You may look up this in the 'Help'.

The following text (SomeText.txt) file saved at a suitable location on the hard drive is used. This particular text is: Rose is RedChrysanthemum is yellowViolets are violetRose can be PinkHyacinth is whiteDesk jobs are the bestLily is also whiteThe girl is wearing a rose garlandThe boy is handsomePink rose is not redrose garland is made of rosesRoserose is not roseHe rose to powerThe desk is made of rose wood The reason for using the above text is to see how well the Term Extract transformation is able to distinguish words and phrases and find how often they are found in a body of text. The transformation works for text in English and is capable of distinguishing between nouns and other parts of speech. In the following steps we will create a Visual Studio 2005 Business Intelligence project and access some text stored on the hard drive, and apply this transformation and review the results. Creating a Business Intelligence Project In the Visual Studio 2005 IDE, File | New | Project opens the New Project window as shown, where you can highlight the Integration Services Project template in the Business Intelligence page and change its default name to something different. For this tutorial TermExtract has been used as the project name. Text to be accessed shown above is saved to a file, SomeText.txt in the C: drive. In order to access this from the Integration Services we need to create a Package with a data flow task. The source for this data is the SomeText.txt file on the C: drive. Change the name of the default package file name to something different, In this case MineText.dtsx. Click Yes on the Microsoft Visual Studio message box asking whether you want to rename the package. Add a Data Flow Task Drag and drop a Data Flow Task to the Control Flow page as shown in the next figure. The Data Flow Task will access the SomeText.txt using a connection manager, an intermediary between SQL Server Integration Services and the external system. Add a Flat File Source Click on the Data Flow Task page. Drag and drop a Flat File Source from the Data Flow Sources group in the Toolbox and drop it on the Data Flow Page which is open as shown. When the Flat File Source is dropped on the Data Flow Task page you may see this error in the error window as shown. This is nothing to worry about because a connection is not yet established. Add a Connection Manager to Manage Flat File Source Now right click in the Connection Manager's pane as shown to display the pick list of connection managers and choose New Flat File Connection... as shown. This immediately displays the Flat File Connection Manager's editor window as shown. You must provide a name of your choice to the Connection Manager, and a description of your choice. Then you need to use the Browse button to locate the SomeText.txt file on your hard drive. The next figure shows the editor after these choices are made. The rest of the fields such as Locale, Code page, etc were automatically chosen by the program. Now click on the Columns list item in the left of the Editor. The one column that gets populated with the data from the SomeText.txt gets displayed. The program has correctly configured the fields for this text. Click on the OK button on the Editor. This adds a Connection Manager, MyText to the Connection manager's pane in the SSIS designer. With this, the SomeText.txt is available for the other controls that you may add. Add a Term Extraction Transformation The column that was populated in the above will now pass through the Term Extraction Transformation added by dragging and dropping this from the Toolbox on to the Data Flow Page. Click the dangling green line and extend it to touch the Term Extraction Transformation. This is an easy way to establish a connection from the source to a transformation, a destination. Double click the Term Extraction Transformation to open its Editor as shown in the next figure. In the Term Extraction tabbed page you see a single column which is displayed unchecked. Place a check mark for this column as shown in the next figure. When the 'terms' are extracted, the output column will have a 'term' and a 'score' column. The term refers to a noun, a noun phrase, or a noun and a noun phrase. The score represents how many times each term is repeated in the body of the text. Pay attention to the message that says the column can have only values of a certain types and the disabled OK button. The data type of the data going into the Term Extract Transformation can be found by right clicking on the connecting green line and looking at the page that reveals the Meta data list item as shown in the next figure. This is of the data type DT_STR. To rectify this, there are two options, either use one more transformation, the data conversion transformation or use the Advanced Editor of the Flat File Source which can be displayed by right clicking the Flat File source component and choosing the Show Advanced Editor. This option was made to change Str[DT_STR] to Unicode str [DT_WSTR]. The DT_* shows the data type that are supported. The following information about these data types are shown extracted from the Books on line. DT_STR: A null-terminated ANSI/MBCS character string DT_NTEXT: A Unicode character string with a maximum length of 2^30-1 characters DT_WSTR: a null terminated Unicode character string Now when you place a check mark for the Column 0 in the Term Extract Transformation Editor, the OK gets enabled. Click on the Exclusion tab to reveal its page. This page when configured, allows you to exclude (skip) certain terms stored in an OLEDB database. The figure shows the details of editing this page. A Microsoft Access 2003 database called 'SkipTerms' was created and a new table 'SkipTable' was created in this database. It has two columns SkipID (autonumber, Primary Key) and SkipThis (text). A new OLEDB Connection was established along the same lines as the connection manager to the Flat File Source. Of course you need to choose an OLEDB Provider in making this connection. The 'SkipThis' column has just one entry, 'desk'. This noun is found twice in SomeText.txt. The word 'desk' will be skipped in the output column when the Column 0 is processed by this transformation. Click on the Advanced tab to open its page as shown. This is where you choose type of terms, nouns, noun phrases, or both noun and noun phrases. You also select the score which shows how many times (Frequency and Frequency Threshold) the terms appear in the text. As chosen here, the transformation will be looking for noun(s) that gets repeated twice. The case sensitive option can also be chosen but left blank in this exercise. The score type TFIDF is another type of scoring more appropriate for a document collection and not a single document like in this article. You may learn more details on this from this link.  

Introduction SOA enablement wraps key application interfaces in services, and integrates it into the SOA. This largely leaves the existing application logic intact, minimizing changes and adding risk only to those components that needed restructuring work to become SOA-ready. While the interfaces are modernized, without subjecting the core application components to a lot of change, the high costs and the various legacy risks associated with the mainframe platform remain. In addition, the performance and scalability of the new interfaces needs to be well-specified and tested, and the additional load they place on the system should be included in any planned capacity upgrades, potentially increasing the overall costs. Reducing or eliminating the legacy mainframe costs and risks via re-host based modernization also helps customers to fund SOA enablement, and the re-architecture phases of legacy modernization, and lay the groundwork for these steps. SOA-enabling a re-hosted application is a much easier process on an open-systems-based, SOA-ready software stack, and a more efficient one as well in terms of system resource utilization and cost. Re-architecting selected components of a re-hosted application based on specific business needs is a lower risk approach than re-architecting the entire applications en masse, and the risk can be further reduced by ensuring that target re-hosting stack provides rugged and transparent integration between re-hosted services and new components. Keeping It Real: Selective re-architecture is all about maximizing ROI by focusing re-architecture investment in the areas with the best pay-off. Undertaking a change from one language or development paradigm to another shouldn't be undertaken lightly—the investment and risks need to be well understood and justified. It is the right investment for components that require frequent maintenance changes but are difficult to maintain, because of poor /structure and layered changes. The payback on re-architecture investment will come from reducing the cost of future maintenance. Similarly, components that need significant functional changes to meet new business requirements can benefit from substantial productivity increase after re-architecture to a more modern development framework with richer tools to support future changes. The payback comes from greater business agility and time-to-market improvements. On the other hand, well-structured and maintainable COBOL components that do not need extensive changes to meet business needs will have very little return to show for the significant re-architecture investment. Leaving them in COBOL on a modern, extensible platform saves significant re-architecture costs that can be invested elsewhere, reduces risk, and shortens payback time. These considerations can help to optimize ROI for medium to large modernization projects where components measure in hundreds or thousands and contain millions or tens of millions lines of code. Re-Hosting Based Modernization For many organizations, mainframe modernization has become a matter of 'how', and not 'if'. Numerous enterprises and public sector organizations choose re-hosting as the first tangible step in their legacy modernization program precisely because it delivers the best ROI in the fastest possible manner, and accelerates the move to SOA enablement and selective re-architecture. Oracle together with our services partners provides a comprehensive re-hosting-based modernization solution that many customers have leveraged for a successful migration of selected applications or complete mainframe environments ranging from a few hundred MIPS to well over 10,000 MIPS. Two key pillars support successful re-hosting projects: Optimal target environment that lowers the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by 50–80 percent and maintains mainframe-class Quality of Service (QoS) using open, extensible, SOA-ready, future-proof architecture Predictable, efficient projects delivered by our SI partners with proven methodologies and automated tools Optimal target environment provided by Oracle is powered by proven open systems software stack leveraging Oracle Database and Oracle Tuxedo for a rock-solid, mainframe-class transaction processing (TP) infrastructure closely matching mainframe requirements for online applications. Mainframe-compatible Transaction Processing: Support for IBM CICS or IMS TM applications in native COBOL or C/C++ language containers with mainframe-compatible TP features. RASP: Mainframe-class performance, reliability, and scalability provided by Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Tuxedo multi-node and multi-domain clustering for load-balancing and high availability despite failure of individual nodes or network links. Workload and System Management: End-to-end transaction and service monitoring to support 24X7 operations management provided by Oracle's Enterprise Manager Grid Control and Tuxedo System and Application Monitor. SOA Enablement and Integration: Extensibility with Web services using Oracle Services Architecture Leveraging Tuxedo (SALT), J2EE integration (using WebLogic-Tuxedo Connector (WTC), Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Portal, and BPM technologies to enable easy integration of re-hosted applications into modern Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs). Scalable Platforms and Commodity Hardware: Scalable, Linux/UNIX-based open systems from HP, Dell, Sun, and IBM, providing: Performance on a par with mainframe systems for most workloads at significantly reduced TCO Reliability and workload management similar to mainframe installations, including physical and logical partitioning Robust clustering technologies for high availability and fail-over capabilities within a data center or across the world The diagram below shows conceptual mapping of mainframe environment to compatible open systems infrastructure: Predictable, efficient projects delivered by leading SIs and key modernization specialists use risk-mitigation methodologies, and automated tools honed over numerous projects to address a complete range of Online, Batch, and Data architectures, and the various technologies used in them. These project methodologies and automated tools that support them encompass all phases of a migration project: Preliminary Assessment Study Application Asset Discovery and Analysis Application and Data Conversion (pilot or entire application portfolio) System and Application Integration Test Engineering Regression and Performance Testing Education and Training Operations Migration Switch-Over Combining a proven target architecture stack that is well-matched to the needs of mainframe applications with mature methodologies supported by automated tools has led to a large and growing number of successful re-hosting projects. There is a rising interest to leverage the re-hosting approach to mainframe application modernization, as a way to get off a mainframe fast, and with minimal risk, in a more predictable manner for large, business-critical applications evolved over a long term and multiple development teams. Re-hosting based modernization approach preserves an organizations long term investment in critical business logic and data without risking business operations or sacrificing the QoS, while enabling customers to: Reduce or eliminate mainframe maintenance costs, and/or defer upgrade costs, saving customers 50–80 percent of their annual maintenance and operations budget Increase productivity and flexibility in IT development and operations, protecting long-term investment through application modernization Speed up and simplify application integration via SOA, without losing transactional integrity and the high performance expected by the users The rest of this article explores the critical success factors and proven transformation architecture for re-hosting legacy applications and data, describes SOA integration options and considerations when SOA-enabling re-hosted applications, highlights key risk mitigation methodologies, and provides a foundation for the financial analysis and ROI model derived from over a hundred, mainframe re-hosting projects. Critical Success Factors in Mainframe Re-Hosting Companies considering a re-hosting-based modernization strategy that involves migrating some applications off the mainframe have to address a range of concerns, which can be summarized by the following questions: How to preserve the business logic of these applications and their valuable data? How to ensure that migrated applications continue to meet performance requirements? How to maintain scalability, reliability, transactional integrity, and other QoS attributes in an open system environment? How to migrate in phases, maintaining robust integration links between migrated and mainframe applications? How to achieve predictable, cost-effective results and ensure a low-risk project? Meeting these challenges requires a versatile and powerful application infrastructure—one that natively supports key mainframe languages and services, enables automated adaptation of application code, and delivers proven, mainframe-like QoS on open system platforms. For re-hosting to enable broader aspects of the modernization strategy, this infrastructure must also provide native Web services and ESB capabilities to rapidly integrate re-hosted applications as first-class services in an SOA. Equally important is a proven, risk-mitigation methodology, automated tools, and project services specifically honed to address automated conversion and adaptation of application code and data, supported by cross-platform test engineering and execution methodology, strong system and application integration expertise, and deep experience with operations migration and switch-over. Preserving Application Logic and Data The re-hosting approach depends on a mainframe-compatible transaction processing and application services platform supporting common mainframe languages such as COBOL and C, which preserves the original business logic and data for the majority of mainframe applications and avoids the risks and uncertainties of a re-write. A complete re-hosting solution provides native support for TP and Batch programs, leveraging an application server-based platform that provides container-based support for COBOL and C/C++ application services, and TP APIs similar to IBM CICS, IMS TM, or other mainframe TP monitors. Online Transaction Processing Environment Oracle Tuxedo is the most popular TP platform for open systems, as well as leading re-hosting platform that can run most of mainframe COBOL and C applications unchanged in container-based framework that combines common application server features, including health monitoring, fail-over, service virtualization, and dynamic load balancing critical to large-scale OLTP applications together with standard TP features, including transaction management and reliable coordination of distributed transactions (a.k.a. Two-Phase Commit or XA standard). It provides the highest possible performance and scalability, and has been recently benchmarked against a mainframe at over 100,000 transactions per second, with sub-second response time. Oracle Tuxedo supports common mainframe programming languages, that is, COBOL and C, and provides comprehensive TP features compatible with CICS and IMS TM, which makes it a preferred application platform choice for re-hosting CICS or IMS TM applications with minimal changes and risks. In the Tuxedo environment, COBOL or C business logic remains unchanged. The only adaptation required is automated mapping of CICS APIs (CICS EXEC calls) to equivalent Tuxedo API functions. This mapping typically leverages a pre-processor and a mapping library implemented on Tuxedo platform, and using a full range of Tuxedo APIs. The automated nature of pre-processing and comprehensive coverage provided by the library ensures that most CICS COBOL or C programs are easily transformed into Tuxedo services. Unlike other solutions that embed this transformation in their compiler coupled with a proprietary emulation run-time, Tuxedo-based solution provides this mapping as a compiler-independent source module, which can be easily extended as needed. The resultant code uses Tuxedo API at native speed, allowing it to reach tens of thousands of transactions per second, while taking advantage of all Tuxedo facilities. In a re-hosted application CICS transactions become Tuxedo services, registered for processing by Tuxedo server processes. These services can be deployed in a single machine or across multiple machines in a Tuxedo domain (SYSPLEX-like cluster.). The services are called by front-end Java, .Net, or Tuxedo/WS clients, or UI components (tn3270 or web-based converted 3270/BMS screens), or by other services in case of transaction linking. Deferred transactions are handled by Tuxedo's/Q component, which provides in-memory and persistent queuing services. The diagram below shows Oracle Tuxedo and its surrounding ecosystem of SOA, J2EE, ESB, CORBA, MQ, and Mainframe integration components:   User Interface Migration The UI elements in these programs are typically defined using CICS Basic Mapping Support (BMS) for 3270 "green screen" terminals. While it is possible to preserve these using tn3270 emulation, many customers in re-hosting projects choose to take advantage of automated conversion of BMS macros into JSP/HTML for Web UI. Supported by a specialized Javascript library, these Web screens mimic the appearance and the behavior of "green screens" in a web browser, including tab-based navigation and PF keys. These UI components can connect to re-hosted CICS transactions running as Tuxedo services using Oracle Jolt (Java client interface for Tuxedo), Weblogic-Tuxedo Connector (WTC), or Tuxedo's Web services gateway provided by Oracle Services Architecture Leveraging Tuxedo (SALT) product. The diagram on the next page depicts a target re-hosting architecture for a typical mainframe OLTP application. The architecture uses Tuxedo services to run re-hosted CICS programs and a web application server to run re-hosted BMS UI. The servlets or JSPs containing the HTML that defines the screens, connect with Tuxedo services via Oracle Jolt, WTC, or SALT. Customers using mainframe 4GLs or languages such as PL/I or Assembler frequently choose to convert these applications to COBOL or C/C++. The adaptation of CICS or IMS TM API calls is automated through a mapping layer, which minimizes overall changes for the development team and allows them to maintain the familiar applications. For more significant extensions and new capabilities, customers incrementally leverage Tuxedo's own APIs and facilities, or leverage a tightly-linked J2EE environment provided by the WebLogic Server, and even transparently make Web services calls. The optimal extensibility options depend on application needs, availability of Java or C/COBOL skills, and other factors.   Feature or Action CICS Verb Tuxedo API Communications Area DFHCOMMAREA Typed Buffer Transaction Request LINK tpcall Transaction Return RETURN tpreturn Transfer Control XCTL tpforward Allocate Storage GETMAIN tpalloc Queues READQ / WRITEQ TD,TS /Q tpenqueue / tpdequeue Begin new transaction START TRANID /Q and TMQFORWARD Abort transaction ISSUE ABEND tpreturn TPFAIL Commit or Rollback SYNCPOINT / SYNCPOINT ROLLBACK tpcommit / tpabort     Keeping it Real:For those familiar with CICS, this is a very short example of the CICS verbs. CICS has many functions, most of which either map natively to a similar Tuxedo API or are provided by migration specialists based on their extensive experience with such migrations. In summary, Tuxedo provides a popular platform for deploying, executing, and managing COBOL and C re-hosted transactional applications requiring any of the following OLTP and infrastructure services: Native, compiler-independent support for COBOL, C, or C++ Rich set of infrastructure services for managing and scaling diverse workloads Feature-set compatibility and inter-operability with IBM CICS and IMS/TM Two-Phase Commit (2PC) for managing transactions across multiple application domains and XA-compliant resource managers (databases, message queues) Guaranteed inter-application messaging and transactional queuing Transactional data access (using XA-compliant resource managers) with ACID qualities Services virtualization and dynamic load balancing Centralized management of multiple nodes in a domain, and across multiple domains Communications gateways for multiple traditional and modern communication protocols SOA Enablement through native Web services and ESB integration Workload Monitoring and Management An important aspect of the mainframe environment is workload monitoring and management, which provides information for effective performance analysis and capabilities that enable mainframe systems to achieve better throughput and responsiveness. Oracle's Tuxedo System and Application Monitor (TSAM) provides similar capabilities too. Define monitoring policies and patterns based on application requests, services, system servers such as gateways, bridges, and XA-defined stages of a distributed transaction Define SLA thresholds that can trigger a variety of events within Tuxedo event services including notifications, and instantiation of additional servers Monitor transactions on an end-to-end basis from a client call through all services across all domains involved in a client request Collect service statistics for all infrastructure components such as servers and gateways Detail time spent on IPC queues, waiting on network links, and time spent on subordinate services TSAM provides a built-in, central, web-based management and monitoring console, and an open framework for integration with third-party performance management tools. Batch Jobs Mainframe batch jobs are a response to a human 24-hour clock on which many businesses run. It includes beginning-of-period or end-of-period (day, week, month, quarter) processing for batched updates, reconciliation, reporting, statement generation, and similar applications. In some industries, external events tied to a fixed schedule such as intra-day, opening or closing trade in a stock exchange, drive specific processing needs. Batch applications are an equally important asset, and often need to be preserved and migrated as well. The batch environment uses Job Control Language (JCL) jobs managed and monitored by JES2 or JES3 (Job Entry System), which invoke one or more programs, access and manipulate large datasets and databases using sort and other specialized utilities, and often run under the control of a job scheduler such as CA-7/CA-11. JCL defines a series of job steps—a sequence of programs and utilities, specifies input and output files, and provides exception handling. Automated parsing and translation of JCL jobs to UNIX scripts such as Korn shell (ksh) or Perl, enables the overall structure of the job to remain the same, including job steps, classes, and exception handling. Standard shell processing is supplemented with required utilities such as SyncSort, and support for Generation Data Group (GDG) files. REXX/CLIST/PROC scripting environments on the mainframe are similarly converted to ksh or other scripting languages. Integration with Oracle Scheduler, or other job schedulers running in UNIX/Linux or Windows provides a rich set of calendar and event-based scheduling capabilities as well as dependency management similar to mainframe schedulers. In some cases, reporting done via batch jobs can be replaced using standard reporting packages such as Oracle BI Publisher. The diagram below shows a typical target re-hosting architecture for batch. It includes a scheduler to control and trigger batch jobs, scripting framework to support individual job scripts, and an application server execution framework for the batch COBOL or C programs. Unlike other solutions that run these programs directly as OS processes without the benefit of application server middleware, Oracle recommends using container-based middleware to provide higher reliability, availability, and monitoring to the batch programs. The target batch programs invoked by the scripts can also run directly as OS processes, but if mainframe-class management and monitoring similar to JES2 or JES3 environment is a requirement, these programs can run as services under Tuxedo, benefiting from the health monitoring, fail-over, load balancing, and other application server-like features it provides. Files and Databases When moving platforms (mainframe to open systems), the application and data have to be moved together. Data schemas and data stores need to be moved in a re-hosted mainframe modernization project just as with a re-architecture. The approach taken depends on the source data store. DB2 is the most straightforward, since DB2 and Oracle are both relational databases. In addition to migrating the data, customers sometimes choose to perform data cleansing, field extensions, merge columns, or other data maintenance practices leveraging the automated tooling that synchronizes all data changes with changes to the application's data access code. Mainframe DB2 DB2 is a predominant relational database on IBM mainframes. When migrating to Oracle Database, the migration approach is highly automated, and resolves all discrepancies between the two RDBMS in terms of field formats as well as error codes returned to applications, so as to maintain application behavior unchanged, including stored procedures if any. IMS IMS/DB (also known as DL/1) is a popular hierarchical database for older applications. Creating appropriate relational data schema for this data requires an understanding of the application access patterns so as to optimize the schema for best performance based on the most frequent access paths. To minimize code impact, a translation layer can be used at run-time to support IMS DB style data access from the application, and map it to appropriate SQL calls. This allows the applications to interface with the segments, now translated as DB2 UDB or ORACLE tables, without impacting application code and maintenance. VSAM VSAM files are used for keyed-sequential data access, and can be readily migrated to ISAM files or to Oracle Database tables wherever transactional integrity is required (XA features). Some customers also choose to migrate VSAM files to Oracle Database to provide accessibility from other distributed applications, or to simplify the re-engineering required to extend certain data fields or merge multiple data sources. Meeting Performance and Other QoS Requirements The mainframe's performance, reliability, scalability, manageability, and other QoS attributes have earned it pre-eminence for business-critical applications. How well do re-hosting solutions measure up against these characteristics? Earlier solutions based on IBM CICS emulators derived from development tools often did not measure up to the demands of mainframe workloads since they were never intended for true production environment and have not been exposed to large-scale applications. As a result, they have only been used for re-hosting small systems under 300 MIPS and not requiring any clustering or distributed workload handling. Oracle Tuxedo was built to scale ground up, to support high performance telecommunications operations. It has the distinction of being the only non-mainframe TP solution recognized for its mainframe-like performance, reliability, and QoS characteristics. Most large enterprise customers requiring such capabilities in distributed systems have traditionally relied on Tuxedo. Consistently rated by IDC and Gartner as the market leader, and predominant in non-mainframe OLTP applications, it has also become the preferred COBOL/C application platform and transaction engine for re-hosted mainframe applications requiring high performance and/or mission-critical availability and reliability. Reasons for the broad recognition of Tuxedo as the only mainframe-class application platform and transaction engine for distributed systems are based on mainframe-class performance, scalability, reliability, availability, and other QoS attributes proven in multiple customer deployments. The following table highlights some of these capabilities:   Reliability Availability Guaranteed messaging and transactional integrity Hardened code from 25 years of use in the world's largest transaction applications Transaction integrity across systems and domains through a two phase commit (XA) for all resources such as databases, queues, and so on. Proven in mainframe-to-mainframe transactions and messaging No single point of failure, 99.999% uptime with N+1/N+2 clusters Application services upgradeable in operation Self-monitoring, automated fail-over, datadriven routing for super high availability Centralized monitoring and management with clustered domains; automated, lights-out operations     Workload Management   Performance and Scalability   Resource management and prioritization across Tuxedo services Dynamic load balancing across domains based on load conditions Data-driven routing enables horizontally distributed database grids and differentiated QoS End-to-end monitoring of Tuxedo system and application services enables SLA enforcement Virtualization support enables spawning of Tuxedo servers on demand Parallel processing to maximize resource utilization with low latency code paths that provide sub-second response at any load Horizontal and vertical scaling of system resources yields linear performance increases Request multiplexing (synchronous and asynchronous) maximizes CPU utilization Proven in credit card authorizations at over 13.5K tps, and in telco billing at over 56K tps. Middleware of choice in HP, Fujitsu, Sun, IBM, and NEC TPC-C benchmarks    

User Accounts and their Properties Working as the non-admin user has several benefits: Changes to settings are tracked via user name Custom alerting rules can be defined per user Access can be restricted per user Let's add a new user: Select Settings from the navigation panel. Select the Users tab. From the Users table menu, select Add New User. Enter the User Name and Email address in the Add User dialog box. Click OK to create the user account. The new user name is added to the list of users (see following screenshot) along with columns for Email address, Pager, address, and Roles. Before a new user can log in, we must specify a password. To create a password and configure the account, edit the user account by clicking on the user name from the Users table. The following table includes the fields we can set via the Edit Screen.   Property Description Password Specify the new password in the first text field. Retype the password in the second box and click save to verify the passwords match. Roles Specify a user role. Available options are Manager, ZenManager, and ZenUser. Groups If the user is a member of a defined group, select it. Groups are defined in Settings > Users. Email Enter an email address if the user has to receive alerts via email. Pager Enter a pager number if the user will receive alerts via pager. Default Page Size Specify number of entries displayed in a grid listing. Default is 40. Default Admin Role Select the default role for administered objects. Default Admin Level This field is not currently used and is reserved for future use. Dashboard Refresh Enter the time in seconds that the dashboard refreshes for the user. The default is 30 seconds. Dashboard Timeout Enter the time in seconds before the dashboard refresh timeouts. The default is 25 seconds. Dashboard Organizer Select the organizer view for the Device Issues dashboard portlet. The user can change or select a new organizer via the Preferences link. Available options include: Devices Systems Groups Locations Network Map Start Object Specify a default network from the monitored networks to map on the Network Maps view. For example, 192.168.1.1.

This is the second article in the article mini-series on Python LDAP applications by Matt Butcher. For first part please visit this link. In this article we will see some of the LDAP operations such as compare operation, search operation. We will also see how to change an LDAP password. The LDAP Compare Operation One of the simplest LDAP operations to perform is the compare operation. The LDAP compare operation takes a DN, an attribute name, and an attribute value and checks the directory to see if the given DN has an attribute with the given attribute name, and the given attribute value. If it returns true then there is a match, and if false then otherwise. The Python-LDAP API supports LDAP compare operations through the LDAPObject's compare() and compare_s() functions. The synchronous function is simple. It takes three string parameters (DN, attribute name, and asserted value), and returns 0 for false, and 1 for true: >>> dn = 'uid=matt,ou=users,dc=example,dc=com'>>> attr_name = 'sn'>>> attr_val = 'Butcher'>>> con.compare_s(dn, attr_name, attr_val)1 In this case, we check the DN uid=matt,ou=user,dc=example,dc=com to see if the surname (sn) has the value Butcher. It does, so the method returns 1. But let's set the attr_val to a different surname, one that the record does not contain: >>> attr_val = 'Smith'>>> con.compare_s(dn, attr_name, attr_val)0>>> Since the record identified by the DN uid=matt,ou=users,dc=example,dc=com does not have an SN attribute with the value Smith, this method returns 0, false. Historically, Python has treated the boolean value False with 0, and numeric values greater than zero as boolean True. So it is possible to use a compare like this: if con.compare_s(dn, attr_name, attr_val): print "Match"else: print "No match." If compare_s() returns 1, this will print Match. If it returns 0, it will print No match. Let's take a quick look, now, at the asynchronous version of the compare operation, compare(). As we saw in the section on binding, the asynchronous version starts the operation in a new thread, and then immediately returns control to the program, not waiting for the operation to complete. Later, the result of the operation can be examined using the LDAPObject's result() method. Running the compare() method is almost identical to the synchronized version, with the difference being the value returned: >>> retval = con.compare( dn, attr_name, attr_val )>>> print retval15 Here, we run a compare() method, storing the identification number for the returned information in the variable retval. Finding out the value of the returned information is a little trickier than one might guess. Any attempt to retrieve the result of a compare operation using the result() method will raise an exception. But, this is not a sign that the application has encountered an error. Instead, the exception itself indicates whether the compare operation returned true or false. For example, let's fetch the result for the previous operation in the way we might expect: >>> print con.result( retval )Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/ldap/ldapobject.py", line 405, in result res_type,res_data,res_msgid = self.result2(msgid,all,timeout) File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/ldap/ldapobject.py", line 409, in result2 res_type, res_data, res_msgid, srv_ctrls = self.result3 (msgid,all,timeout) File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/ldap/ldapobject.py", line 415, in result3 rtype, rdata, rmsgid, serverctrls = self._ldap_call (self._l.result3,msgid,all,timeout) File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/ldap/ldapobject.py", line 94, in _ldap_call result = func(*args,**kwargs)ldap.COMPARE_TRUE: {'info': '', 'desc': 'Compare True'} What is going on here? Attempting to retrieve the value resulted in an exception being thrown. As we can see from the last line, the exception raised was COMPARE_TRUE. Why? The developers of the Python-LDAP API worked around a difficulty in the standard LDAP C API by providing the results of the compare operation in the form of raised exceptions. Thus, the way to retrieve information from the asynchronous form of compare is with a try/except block: >>> retval = con.compare( dn, attr_name, attr_val )>>> try: ... con.result( retval )...... except ldap.COMPARE_TRUE:... print "Returned TRUE."...... except ldap.COMPARE_FALSE:... print "Returned FALSE."... Returned TRUE. In this example, we use the raised exception to determine whether the compare returned true, which raises the COMPARE_TRUE exception, or returned false, which raises COMPARE_FALSE. Performing compare operations is fairly straightforward, even with the nuances of the asynchronous version. The next operation we will examine is search. The Search Operation LDAP servers are intended as high read, low write databases, which means that it is expected that most operations that the server handles will be “read” operations that do not modify the contents of the directory information tree. And the main operation for reading a directory, as we have seen throughout this book, is the LDAP search operation. As a reminder, the LDAP search operation typically requires five parameters: The base DN, which indicates where in the directory information tree the search should start. The scope, which indicates how deeply the search should delve into the directory information tree. The search filter, which indicates which entries should be considered matches. The attribute list, which indicates which attributes of a matching record should be returned. A flag indicating whether attribute values should be returned (the Attrs Only flag). There are other additional parameters, such as time and size limits, and special client or server controls, but those are less frequently used. Once a search is processed, the server will return a bundle of information including the status of the search, all of the matching records (with the appropriate attributes), and, occasionally, error messages indicate some outstanding condition on the server. When writing Python-LDAP code to perform searches, we will need to handle all of these issues. In the Python-LDAP API, there are three (functional) variations of the search function: search() search_s() search_st() The first is the asynchronous form, and the second is the synchronous form. The third is a special form of the synchronous form that allows the programmer to add on a hard time limit in which the client must respond. There are two other versions of the search method, search_ext() and search_ext_s(). These two provide parameter placeholders for passing client and server extension mechanisms, but such extension handling is not yet functional, so neither of these functions is performatively different than the three above. We will begin by looking at the second method, search_s(). The search_s() function of the LDAPObject has two required parameters (Base DN and scope), and three optional parameters (search filter, attribute list, and the attrs only flag). Here, we will do a simple search for a list of surnames for all of the users in our directory information tree. For this, we will not need to set the attrs only flag (which is off by default, and, when turned on, will not return the attribute values). But we will need the other four parameters: Base DN: The users branch, ou=users,dc=example,dc=com Scope: Subtree (ldap.SCOPE_SUBTREE) Filter: Any person objects, (objectclass=person) Attributes: Surname (sn) Now we can perform our search in the Python interpreter: >>> import ldap>>> dn = "uid=matt,ou=users,dc=example,dc=com">>> pw = "secret">>> >>> con = ldap.initialize('ldap://localhost')>>> con.simple_bind_s( dn, pw )(97, [])>>>>>> base_dn = 'ou=users,dc=example,dc=com'>>> filter = '(objectclass=person)'>>> attrs = ['sn']>>> >>> con.search_s( base_dn, ldap.SCOPE_SUBTREE, filter, attrs )[('uid=matt,ou=Users,dc=example,dc=com', {'sn': ['Butcher']}),('uid=barbara,ou=Users,dc=example,dc=com', {'sn': ['Jensen']}),('uid=adam,ou=Users,dc=example,dc=com', {'sn': ['Smith']}),('uid=dave,ou=Users,dc=example,dc=com', {'sn': ['Hume']}),('uid=manny,ou=Users,dc=example,dc=com', {'sn': ['Kant']}),('uid=cicero,ou=Users,dc=example,dc=com', {'sn': ['Tullius']}),('uid=mary,ou=Users,dc=example,dc=com', {'sn': ['Wollstonecraft']}),('uid=thomas,ou=Users,dc=example,dc=com', {'sn': ['Hobbes']})]>>> The first seven lines should look familiar – there is nothing in these lines not covered in the previous sections. Next, we declare variables for the Base DN (base_dn), filter (filter), and attributes (attrs). While base_dn and filter are strings, attrs requires a list. In our case, it is a list with one member: ['sn']. Safe FiltersIf you are generating the LDAP filter dynamically (or letting users specify the filter), then you may want to use the escape_filter_chars() and filter_format() functions in the ldap.filter module to keep your filter strings safely escaped. We don't need to create a variable for the scope, since all of the available scopes (subtree, base, and onelevel) are available as constants in the ldap module: ldap.SCOPE_SUBTREE, ldap.SCOPE_BASE, and ldap.SCOPE_ONELEVEL. The line highlighted above shows the search, and the lines following – that big long messy conglomeration of tuples, dicts, and lists – is the result returned from the server. Strictly speaking, the result returned from search_s() is a list of tuples, where each tuple contains a DN string, and a dict of attributes. Each dict of attributes has a string key (the attribute name), and a list of string values. While this data structure is compact, it is not particularly easy to work with. For a complex data structure like this, it can be useful to create some wrapper objects to make use of this information a little more intuitive. The ldaphelper Helper Module To better work with LDAP results, we will create a simple package with just one class. This will be our ldaphelper module, stored in ldaphelper.py: import ldiffrom StringIO import StringIOfrom ldap.cidict import cidictdef get_search_results(results): """Given a set of results, return a list of LDAPSearchResult objects. """ res = [] if type(results) == tuple and len(results) == 2 : (code, arr) = results elif type(results) == list: arr = results if len(results) == 0: return res for item in arr: res.append( LDAPSearchResult(item) ) return resclass LDAPSearchResult: """A class to model LDAP results. """ dn = '' def __init__(self, entry_tuple): """Create a new LDAPSearchResult object.""" (dn, attrs) = entry_tuple if dn: self.dn = dn else: return self.attrs = cidict(attrs) def get_attributes(self): """Get a dictionary of all attributes. get_attributes()->{'name1':['value1','value2',...], 'name2: [value1...]} """ return self.attrs def set_attributes(self, attr_dict): """Set the list of attributes for this record. The format of the dictionary should be string key, list of string alues. e.g. {'cn': ['M Butcher','Matt Butcher']} set_attributes(attr_dictionary) """ self.attrs = cidict(attr_dict) def has_attribute(self, attr_name): """Returns true if there is an attribute by this name in the record. has_attribute(string attr_name)->boolean """ return self.attrs.has_key( attr_name ) def get_attr_values(self, key): """Get a list of attribute values. get_attr_values(string key)->['value1','value2'] """ return self.attrs[key] def get_attr_names(self): """Get a list of attribute names. get_attr_names()->['name1','name2',...] """ return self.attrs.keys() def get_dn(self): """Get the DN string for the record. get_dn()->string dn """ return self.dn def pretty_print(self): """Create a nice string representation of this object. pretty_print()->string """ str = "DN: " + self.dn + "n" for a, v_list in self.attrs.iteritems(): str = str + "Name: " + a + "n" for v in v_list: str = str + " Value: " + v + "n" str = str + "========" return str def to_ldif(self): """Get an LDIF representation of this record. to_ldif()->string """ out = StringIO() ldif_out = ldif.LDIFWriter(out) ldif_out.unparse(self.dn, self.attrs) return out.getvalue() This is a large chunk of code to take in at once, but the function of it is easy to describe. Remember, to use a Python module, you must make sure that the module is in the interpreter's path. See the official Python documentation (http://python.org) for more information. The package has two main components: the get_search_results() function, and the LDAPSearchResult class. The get_search_results() function simply takes the results from a search (either the synchronous ones, or the results from an asynchronous one, fetched with result()) and converts the results to a list of LDAPSearchResult objects. An LDAPSearchResults object provides some convenience methods for getting information about a record. The get_dn() method returns the record's DN, and the following methods all provide access to the attributes or the record: get_dn(): return the string DN for this record. get_attributes(): get a dictionary of all of the attributes. The keys  are attribute name strings, and the values are lists of attribute value  strings. set_attributes(): takes a dictionary with attribute names for keys, and  lists of attribute values for the value field. has_attribute(): takes a string attribute name and returns true if that attribute name is in the dict  of attributes returned. get_attr_values(): given an attribute name, this returns all of the  values for that attribute (or none if that attribute does not exist). get_attr_names(): returns a list of all of the attribute names for this  record. pretty_print(): returns a formatted string presentation of the record. to_ldif(): returns an LDIF formatted representation of the record. This object doesn't add much to the original returned data. It just makes it a little easier to access. Attribute NamesLDAP attributes can have multiple names. The attribute for surnames has two names: surname and sn (though most LDAP directory entries use sn). Either one might be returned by the server. To make your application aware of this difference, you can use the ldap.schema package to get schema information. The Case Sensitivity Gotcha There is one noteworthy detail in the code above. The search operation returns the attributes in a dictionary. The Python dictionary is case sensitive; the key TEST is different than the key test. This exemplifies a minor problem in dealing with LDAP information. Standards-compliant LDAP implementations treat some information in a case-insensitive way. The following items are, as a rule, treated as case-insensitive: Object class names: inetorgperson is treated as being the same as inetOrgPerson. Attribute Names: givenName is treated as being the same as givenname. Distinguished Names: DNs are case-insensitive, though the all-lower-case version of a DN is called  Normalized Form. The main area where this problem surfaces is in retrieving information from a search. Since the attributes are returned in a dict, they are, by default, treated as case-sensitive. For example, attrs.has_key('objectclass') will return False if the object class attribute name is spelled objectClass. To resolve this problem, the Python-LDAP developers created a case-insensitive dictionary implementation (ldap.cidict.cidict). This cidict class is used above to wrap the returned attribute dictionary. Make sure you do something similar in your own code, or you may end up with false misses when you look for attributes in a case-sensitive way, e.g. when you look for givenName in an entry where the attribute name is in the form givenname.

Zen Gift of Education Many distributions have special releases around Christmas and New Year. I was planning to look at some of these this month like last year's Ubuntu Christmas Edition. But instead I found a release that's useful enough to maintain all year around. ZenEdu is a Live distribution that packs a whole bunch of educational tools on top of the Slackware-based light-weight and zippy Zenwalk Linux. As per Zenwalk's Wiki, ZenEdu was initiated by a user on the distro's French forum last year in December. That time the distro contained mostly French-only educational programs. This year, several members of the Zenwalk Linux community decided to release an international edition of ZenEdu. The distro is a goldmine of open source educational software and also packs a detailed user manual, which shows the developers' serious approach to do things properly. The educational apps included in the distro cover a broad range of subjects. The ZenEdu ISO is about 700 MB and includes apps that'll help users with subjects like Astronomy, Mathematics, and Chemistry. Since learning is the core idea behind the distro, it goes beyond traditional curriculum subjects and also packs tools that'll teach students the basics of programming and music. Some of the tools I particularly like are Stellarium - the popular 3D planetarium, Stardict - a multi-language dictionary, ghemical - a comprehensive computational chemistry package, Little Wizard that introduces the basics of programming to young students, and Maxima, for the manipulation of symbolic and numerical expressions, including differentiation, integration, ordinary differential equations, systems of linear equations, etc. If you want to learn music, train your ears with Solfege, and use TuxGuitar to edit and play guitar tablatures. What sets ZenEdu apart from other educational distros is that it bundles other productivity tools as well. This includes general-purpose applications like the IceWeasel web browser, IceDove email client, Pidgin for instant messaging, Kompozer for authoring web pages, and OpenOffice.org for word processing. Furthermore, the distro packs several other apps, which according to the developers, were chosen based on their usefulness to students while keeping in mind the things that might interest them. This includes a simple program to manage personal tasks and todo lists, a drawing program, a comic book viewer, a video editor, and a program to create a wide array of 3D content. However, there are dozens of free software educational tools that aren't included in this CD due to size considerations. But that's no problem. Since ZenEdu is based on Zenwalk, it too can be expanded with drag-and-drop modules. To create a new customize ZenEdu Live CD, browse and download the modules of educational apps you want and use the remastering application, isomaster to add them to your customized ZenEdu Live CD! The highlight of this distro though is the iTALC tool for teachers. iTALC, which stands for Intelligent Teaching And Learning with Computers, is a powerful cross-platform didactical tool that lets teachers view and control other computers in their network. Using iTALC teachers can see what's going on in computer labs and take snapshots, remote-control computers to support and help students, run a demo on all students' computers in real-time, send text-messages to students, cycle power and rebooting computers remotely, etc. ZenEdu has a special 'teacher' account pre-configured to run iTALC. Once logged in from that user, you can start iTALC and navigate through its interface, first adding student computers, and then controlling or monitoring them. ZenEdu's wiki page advices that if you'll be using the program regularly, you should save the 'teacher' account's iTALC directory (/home/teacher/.italc/) inside zenlive/rootcopy of the Live CD via isomaster. This will load the iTALC configuration the next time you boot the remastered Live CD. If you'll be using iTALC regularly you'd be well off installing ZenEdu on to your hard disk. Unfortunately, ZenEdu isn't installable. It's only a Live CD, and at best can be installed onto a USB Flash stick for portability. Most of the specialized distros I've played with, tend to be too specialized. They do what they are supposed to, but nothing more. ZenEdu is different in that, in a single CD, the developers have managed to squeeze a good number of educational apps as well as everyday tools. I hope members of the Zenwalk community, actively develop and maintain ZenEdu.   Some more articles by Mayank Sharma: Meet the Distro guy Making a Complete yet Small Linux Distribution

Introduction Welcome to the first in a new series of articles on Photoshop - the Photoshop Foundations series. The aim of this series is to give both beginners and more experienced users all the information they need to use Photoshop as efficiently as possible. Photoshop is a huge application, and there is usually more than one way to look at a given subject, or perform a certain action. This series aims to both, guide you through the more confusing aspects of Photoshop and show you the very best ways to use this application. In this first article we are going to look at the difference between vector and bitmap graphics, which is one of the most important principles to understand when working with graphics on a computer, inside or outside of Photoshop. Although Photoshop primarily is a bitmap image editor, it is capable of handling vector graphics to a certain extent. This can be a little confusing for people new to creating graphics on a computer, but by the end of this article you should have a clear idea of the difference between these two types of graphics. Bitmap Graphics Bitmap graphics are made up of colored pixels. Pixels are very small rectangles (usually square, although in some video applications they are wider than they are tall) of varying colors that once put together give you an image. You can see from the example below that zooming in on a bitmap image reveals the pixels that make up the image when viewed at 100%.   Bitmap graphics are usually (but not always) photographic in nature, capable of subtle graduated tones - often in the range of millions of colors per image. The problem with bitmap graphics is that they don't enlarge well as Photoshop needs to guess what color the extra pixels should be - this can result is loss of definition and a dramatic lowering in quality, depending on how much you enlarge the image. Common file formats for bitmap image data include GIF, JPEG and PNG for Internet usage and TIFF for print usage. As you can see from the example below, physically enlarging an image will degrade quality. Pixels are also used to display the image on your computer screen. Common pixel dimensions of computer displays are 1024 wide by 768 high and 1600 wide by 1200 high. The size of a bitmap graphic when viewed on your computer screen is defined by the number of pixels that make up the image - so an image that is 50 pixels wide will look very small on your screen at 100% viewing percentage, whereas an image that is 4000 pixels wide will be larger than your screen at 100% viewing percentage. The printable dimensions of an image are defined by the DPI (dots per inch) - this information is invisibly embedded in the image file. Digital cameras often embed information such as this, that may include the conditions the image was taken in, and even the camera model used. This information is not actually visible in the image, and requires software such as Photoshop to read it. You should not confuse the output DPI of your printer with this figure, which may range from 600-2400DPI - this refers to the density of the dots of ink laid down on the page by the printer. You don't have to prepare your images to 2400 DPI to get the best results - in fact doing so will significantly slow down printing as your file could potentially be huge! Often an image DPI in the range of 175-250 will give very good results on home printers. Images prepared for high quality commercial print are usually prepared at 300 DPI for up to A3 in size; whereas very large images (for instance on billboards) can be as low as 50 DPI, as they are not made to be viewed as closely as a magazine or small poster. There is no need to go above 300 DPI when creating images as you will yield virtually no improvement in output quality, only increasing the size of your file when saved. It is easy to understand the relationship between pixel dimensions and DPI - put simply, the DPI is how many pixels will be printed in an inch - so you could actually think of DPI as PPI (pixels per inch). Indeed, many experts believe this to be the true definition of DPI, and that Photoshop should refer to it as such. However, the term DPI is used throughout the professional print industry, so this is why it is referred to as DPI in Photoshop, not PPI.

Various links that enable table operations have been put together on one sub-page of the Table view: Operations. Here is an overview of this sub-page: Table Maintenance During the lifetime of a table, it repeatedly gets modified, and so grows and shrinks. Outages may occur on the server, leaving some tables in a damaged state. Using the Operations sub-page, we can perform various operations, but not every operation is available for every table type: Check table: Scans all rows to verify that deleted links are correct. Also, a checksum is calculated to verify the integrity of the keys; we should get an 'OK' message if everything is all right. Analyze table: Analyzes and stores the key distribution; this will be used on subsequent JOIN operations to determine the order in which the tables should be joined. Repair table: Repairs any corrupted data for tables in the MyISAM and ARCHIVE engines. Note that the table might be so corrupted that we cannot even go into Table view for it! In such a case, refer to the Multi-Table Operations section for the procedure to repair it. Optimize table: This is useful when the table contains overheads. After massive deletions of rows or length changes for VARCHAR fields, lost bytes remain in the table. PhpMyAdmin warns us in various places (for example, in the Structure view) if it feels the table should be optimized. This operation is a kind of defragmentation for the table. In MySQL 4.x, this operation works only on tables in the MyISAM, Berkeley (BDB), and InnoDB engines. In MySQL 5.x, it works only on tables in the MyISAM, InnoDB, andARCHIVE engines. Flush table: This must be done when there have been lots of connection errors and the MySQL server blocks further connections. Flushing will clear some internal caches and allow normal operations to resume. Defragment table: Random insertions or deletions in an InnoDB table fragment its index. The table should be periodically defragmented for faster data retrieval. The operations are based on the underlying MySQL queries available—phpMyAdmin is only calling those queries. Changing Table Attributes Table attributes are the various properties of a table. This section discusses the settings for some of them. Table Type The first attribute we can change is called Table storage engine: This controls the whole behavior of the table: its location (on-disk or in-memory), the index structure, and whether it supports transactions and foreign keys. The drop-down list may vary depending on the table types supported by our MySQL server. Changing the table type may be a long operation if the number of rows is large. Table Comments This allows us to enter comments for the table. These comments will be shown at appropriate places (for example, in the left panel, next to the table name in the Table view and in the export file). Here is what the left panel looks like when the $cfg['ShowTooltip'] parameter is set to its default value of TRUE: The default value of $cfg['ShowTooltipAliasDB'] and $cfg['ShowTooltipAliasTB'] (FALSE) produces the behavior we have seen earlier: the true database and table names are displayed in the left panel and in the Database view for the Structure sub-page. Comments appear when the mouse pointer is moved over a table name. If one of these parameters is set toTRUE, the corresponding item (database names for DB and table names for TB) will be shown as the tooltip instead of the names. This time, the mouse-over shows the true name for the item. This is convenient when the real table names are not meaningful. There is another possibility for $cfg['ShowTooltipAliasTB']: the 'nested' value. Here is what happens if we use this feature: The true table name is displayed in the left panel. The table comment (for example project__) is interpreted as the project name and is displayed as such. Table Order When we Browse a table or execute a statement such as SELECT * from book, without specifying a sort order, MySQL uses the order in which the rows are physically stored. This table order can be changed with the Alter table order by dialog. We can choose any field, and the table will be reordered once on this field. We choose author_id in the example, and after we click Go, the table gets sorted on this field. Reordering is convenient if we know that we will be retrieving rows in this order most of the time. Moreover, if later we use an ORDER BY clause and the table is already physically sorted on this field, the performance should be higher. This default ordering will last as long as there are no changes in the table (no insertions, deletions, or updates). This is why phpMyAdmin shows the (singly) warning. After the sort has been done on author_id, books for author 1 will be displayed first, followed by the books for author 2, and so on. (We are talking about a default browsing of the table without explicit sorting.) We can also specify the sort order: Ascending or Descending. If we insert another row, describing a new book from author 1, and then click Browse, the book will not be displayed along with the other books for this author because the sort was done before the insertion. Table Options Other attributes that influence the table's behavior may be specified using the Table options dialog: The options are: pack_keys:Setting this attribute results in a smaller index; this can be read faster but takes more time to update. Available for the MyISAM storage engine. checksum: This makes MySQL compute a checksum for each row. This results in slower updates, but easier finding of corrupted tables. Available for MyISAM only. delay_key_write: This instructs MySQL not to write the index updates immediately but to queue them for later, which improves performance. Available for MyISAM only. auto-increment: This changes the auto-increment value. It is shown only if the table's primary key has the auto-increment attribute. Renaming, Moving, and Copying Tables The Rename operation is the easiest to understand: the table simply changes its name and stays in the same database. The Move operation (shown in the following screen) can manipulate a table in two ways: change its name and also the database in which it is stored Moving a table is not directly supported by MySQL, so phpMyAdmin has to create the table in the target database, copy the data, and then finally drop the source table. The Copy operation leaves the original table intact and copies its structure or data (or both) to another table, possibly in another database. Here, the book-copy table will be an exact copy of the book source table. After the copy, we will stay in the Table view for the book table unless we selected Switch to copied table. The Structure only copy is done to create a test table with the same structure. Appending Data to a Table The Copy dialog may also be used to append (add) data from one table to another. Both tables must have the same structure. This operation is achieved by entering the table to which we want to copy the data of the current table and choosing Data only. For example, we would want to append data when book data comes from various sources (various publishers), is stored in more than one table, and we want to aggregate all the data to one place. For MyISAM, a similar result can be obtained by using the MERGE storage engine (which is a collection of identical MyISAM tables), but if the table is InnoDB, we need to rely on phpMyAdmin's Copy feature. Multi-Table Operations In the Database view, there is a checkbox next to each table name and a drop-down menu under the table list. This enables us to quickly choose some tables and perform an operation on all those tables at once. Here we select the book-copy and the book tables, and choose the Check operation for these tables. We could also quickly select or deselect all the checkboxes with Check All/Uncheck All. Repairing an "in use" Table The multi-table mode is the only method (unless we know the exact SQL query to type) for repairing a corrupted table. Such tables may be shown with the in use flag in the database list. Users seeking help in the support forums for phpMyAdmin often receive this tip from experienced phpMyAdmin users. Database Operations The Operations tab in the Database view gives access to a panel that enables us to perform operations on a database taken as a whole. Renaming a Database Starting with phpMyAdmin 2.6.0, a Rename database dialog is available. Although this operation is not directly supported by MySQL, phpMyAdmin does it indirectly by creating a new database, renaming each table (thus sending it to the new database), and dropping the original database. Copying a Database Since phpMyAdmin 2.6.1, it is possible to do a complete copy of a database, even if MySQL itself does not support this operation natively. Summary In this article, we covered the operations we can perform on whole tables or databases. We also took a look at table maintenance operations for table repair and optimization, changing various table attributes, table movements, including renaming and moving to another database, and multi-table operations.

XML Security Threats All the components in web services are described in XML. SOAP and all the WS -Security specifications are XML formats. Hence it just makes sense for expressing security data in XML format. Fortunately, there has been no need to invent new cryptography technologies for XML. The XML security standards have used existing cryptography directly. XML-based data transfer has emerged as the standard for organizations to exchange business data. As with all communications over the public Internet, XML-based transfers have their own set of vulnerabilities to confront. Like any other document exchange, XML document exchange must support the usual security measures which are Confidentiality, Integrity, Authenticity, and Non-Repudiation. The following list illustrates some specific XML security threats: Schema Altering — Manipulation of WS schema to alter the data processed by the application.      XML Parameter Tampering — Injection of malicious scripts or content into XML parameters      Coercive Parsing — Injection of malicious content into the XML      Oversized Payload — Sending oversized files to create an XDoS attack      Recursive Payload — Sending mass amounts of nested data to create an XDoS attack against an XML parser      XML Routing Detours — Redirecting sensitive data within the XML path      External Entity Attack — An attack on an application that parses XML input from suspicious sources using an incorrectly configured XML parser These threats pose potentially serious problems to developers creating applications, components, and systems that depend on XML data. The solution for the above problems is XML Encryption. XML Encryption XML Encryption provides end-to-end security for applications that require secure exchange of structured data. XML itself is the most popular technology for structuring data, and therefore XML-based encryption is the natural way to handle complex requirements for security in data interchange applications. XML Encryption is a process for encrypting and decrypting parts of XML documents. Most of today's encryption schemes use transport-level techniques that encrypt an entire request and response stream between a sender and receiver, offering zero visibility into contents of the interchange to intermediaries. Contentlevel encryption converts document fragments into illegible ciphertext, while other elements remain legible as plaintext. Some features of XML encryption are: The ability to encrypt a complete XML file The ability to encrypt a single element of an XML file The ability to encrypt only the contents of an XML element The ability to encrypt binary data within an XML file Encrypting an XML File Here's a short sample XML file that can serve to demonstrate XML encryption:     <?xml version='1.0'?>    <POInfo >        <Name>FJ</Name>        <Amount>125.00</Amount>        <CreditCardNumber>1234-5678-4564-4321</CreditCardNumber>    <Date>July 6, 2006</Date>    </POInfo> When you encrypt an entire XML file, the process simply replaces the root element (<POInfo> in the sample) with an <EncryptedData> element that contains the encryption details, including the encrypted content. Here is how the encrypted file will look:     <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>    <xenc:EncryptedData                Type="http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#Element">        <xenc:EncryptionMethod            Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#aes128-cbc"            />        <ds:KeyInfo >            <xenc:EncryptedKey                >                <xenc:EncryptionMethod                    Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#kw-tripledes"                    />                <xenc:CipherData                    >                    <xenc:CipherValue                        >                        MKeT0ZmHFLwnZaSXO+oZSxlSJ5/BqvblqG76B3nOMU0=                    </xenc:CipherValue>                </xenc:CipherData>            </xenc:EncryptedKey>        </ds:KeyInfo>        <xenc:CipherData            >            <xenc:CipherValue                >                    +M/Tamk/62Lut4HqLpU/es9sdhnNTTpasbeszN8GN8EAJZsX0vvClcKEW                    UAgIdbvyJpprQ+jUIiWJKTz1X3L6VAefHqO963pU3bzmGMo                    pHLqS1Eg7iAPFhKV1PJclyswyyepEjyu+bOgqzgGnS1XA0/V                    NP7kLK70rB2Zb0DSbaCi+7HjTNGWF9YKtPIP5bvrs5xw+x                    HnKO++2EuqzK+deD7mCu8w6sG9vmRCrUR99Mx1QDZon9a2962ZD                    FSwoIJKg5I83GzOU+RObBBUme+yTf7UWybEiwtHp5ZgvuaQYJA=            </xenc:CipherValue>        </xenc:CipherData>    </xenc:EncryptedData> Encrypting a Single Element To encrypt a single element of an XML file, you specify the desired child element, rather than the root element of the input file as the element to encrypt. The following snippet shows the results of encrypting only the <CreditCardNumber> element of the sample file.     <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>    <POInfo >        <Name>John Doe</Name>        <Amount>125.00</Amount>        <xenc:EncryptedData                        Type="http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#Element">            <xenc:EncryptionMethod                Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#aes128-cbc"                />            <ds:KeyInfo >                <xenc:EncryptedKey                    >                    <xenc:EncryptionMethod                        Algorithm=                            "http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#kw-tripledes"                        />                    <xenc:CipherData                        >                        <xenc:CipherValue                            >                                6zhAcEW7KIKrbSjEOkXDrVkmws5zhQQLDO4YYW+RfRY=                        </xenc:CipherValue>                    </xenc:CipherData>                </xenc:EncryptedKey>            </ds:KeyInfo>            <xenc:CipherData                >                <xenc:CipherValue                    >                    JqsRmdSoS+PXqCe80Y8zNiQ49sHTLNaAgHX1Ja7d+u9fv                    TFBrkBMK7C7EHsQTglZ3yT9yCZDuFnjBoQTLULKqOy71Qw                    EPRPObtYLPIJgy1vUdNrw47uDmJ/R5r/B0SH37HN8mfNv                    i50zPt1qPxxRwA==                </xenc:CipherValue>            </xenc:CipherData>        </xenc:EncryptedData>        <Date>July 6, 2005</Date>    </POInfo> Notice that the encryption process replaced the <CreditCardNumber> tag and its contents with an <EncryptedData> tag, while leaving the siblings of the <CreditCardNumber> element unaltered. This type of encryption can be performed using XML Signature and Encryption. The interested reader may look up the implementation at the Apache site (http://xml.apache.org/security/). Best practices for XML encryption, can be summarized as follows: It is good to have standard element tags for representing encrypted elements within the XML documents. This will enable parsers to better understand encrypted elements and data during the validation process.      It is necessary to provide means for encrypting only the desired elements within an XML document instead of encrypting the whole document. This will pave the way for incorporating several confidential data elements that are intended for different recipients within a single XML document.      There should be standard mechanisms for exchanging the secret keys used for encryption and decryption processes.      The standard should allow encryption of different parts of the document with different keys, so that multiple recipients can decrypt only those portions that are intended for them.      The standards should be adaptable to both ASCII and binary data.      The standards should be adaptable to different cryptographic algorithms.      The standards should work along with other XML security standards and specifications.

Built-In Search Engine Verity comes in package with ColdFusion. One of the reasons why people pay for ColdFusion is the incredible power that comes with this tool. It should be noted that one of the most powerful standalone commercial search engines is this tool. Some of the biggest companies in the world have expanded internal services with the help of the Verity tool that we will learn about. We can see that in order to start, we must create collections. The building of search abilities is a three-step process. There is a standard ColdFusion tag to help us with each of these functions. Create collections Index the collections Search the collections These collections can contain information about web pages, binary documents, and can even work as a powerful way to search cached query result information. There are many document formats supported. In the real business world, the latest bleeding-edge solutions will still store a previous version. Archived and shared documents should be stored in appropriate formats and versions that can be searched. Creating a Collection The first thing is to make our collection. See the ColdFusion Administrator under Data & Services. Here, we will be able to add collections and edit existing collections. There is one default collection included in ColdFusion installations. This is the bookclub demonstration application data. We will be creating a collection of PDF documents for this lesson. We have placed a collection of ColdFusion, Flex, and some of the Fusion Authority Quarterly periodicals in a directory for indexing. Here is the information screen for adding the collection through the administrator. We choose to select the Enable Category Support option. Also, there are libraries available for multiple languages if that is appropriate in a collection. We now see that there is a new collection for our devdocs. There are four icons to work with this collection. They are, from right to left, index, optimize, purge, and remove actions. The Name link takes us to the index action. The collection gives us the number of actual documents present, and the size of the index file on the server. The screen will show the details of the index as to when it was last modified, and the language in which it is stored. It lists the categories, and also shows the actual path where the index is stored. Here is a code version of creating a collection that would achieve the same thing. This means that it is possible to create an entire administrative interface to manage collections. It is also possible to move from tags to objects, and wrap up all the functions in that style. <cfcollection action="create" collection="devdocs" path="c:ColdFusion8veritycollectionsdocuments" /> If we have categories in our collection, and we want to get a list of the categories, then the following code must be used: <cfcollection action="categoryList" collection="bookClub" name="myCats" /><cfdump var="#myCats#"> Indexing a Collection We can do this through the administration interface. But here, we will do it as shown in the the following screenshot. This is a limited directory that we have used as an example for searching. This is the result of the devdocs submitted above. This gave a result of 12 documents with a search collection of the size, 4,611 Kb. Now, we will look at how to do the same search using code and build the index outside the administrator interface. This will require the collection to be built before we try to index files into it. The creation of the collection can also be done inside the administration interface or in code. It should also be noted that ColdFusion includes a security called Sandbox Security. These three core tags for Verity searching among many others can be blocked if you find it better for your environment. Just consider what is actually getting indexed and what needs to be searched. Hopefully, documents will be secured correctly and it will not be an issue. When we are making an index, we have to make sure that we can either choose to use a recursive search or not. A recursive search means that all the subdirectories in a document or web page search will be included in our search. It should also be noted that the service will not work for indexing other websites. It is for indexing this server only. <cfindex name="myCats" action="refresh" collection="bookClub" recurse="true" type="path" extensions=".html .htm .cfm .cfml" key="c:inetpubwwwrootdocuments" urlpath="http://localhost/documents/" /> Your collection has been indexed. It is important to note that there is no output from this tag. So we need to put some text on the screen to make sure the person using the site can know that the task has been completed. If we want to index a single file rather than a whole directory path, we can do it with this code: <cfindex action="refresh" collection="bookClub" recurse="true" type="file" extensions=".pdf" key=" c:inetpubwwwrootdocumentsColdFusioncf8_devguide.pdf" urlpath="http://localhost/documents/ColdFusion" /> Your collection has been indexed.

How to Integrate with CMS? While attempting integration of one CMS with another, some simple principles should be remembered. For all integration attempts, you have to consider the following aspects: Master-slave relationship: While integrating one CMS with the other, one of the applications act as the master and the other as the slave. If you integrate application A to application B, then application B will be considered as master. Master applications maintain authentication and sessions for both applications. While integrating Zen Cart with some other CMS, first consider whether Zen Cart will be the master or the slave. If you are integrating Zen Cart with an existing website, Zen Cart is going to be the slave. On the other hand, when you are adding blogging functionality to the Zen Cart shop by integrating WordPress with Zen Cart, Zen Cart is going to be the master. User and Group Management: One purpose of integrating two CMSs is to have a common user and group management system. Zen Cart integration may be tight, where both Zen Cart and an other CMS will use the same database for user and group management. On the other hand, loose integration will allow periodic or event-based synchronization of user or group databases. Tight integration becomes easier when both CMSs use the same type of user database. If the user databases are very different from each other, then tight integration may not be possible and some sort of fallback solution such as synchronizing the databases may be used. Visual integration: Users see the integration only through the visual integration. In fact, visual integration should be such that users will be unaware of integration attempt. While integrating the two CMSs, the visual template of the master should preferably be used for both CMSs. However, using a master's template system is difficult and a central template system should be developed which can be used for both applications. Now, we will see how to integrate Zen Cart with other CMSs. You will notice that at least one of the above-mentioned aspects is present in such integrations. Joomla!/Mambo If you are using Joomla!/Mambo and want e-commerce functionality, you have a number of choices. Among these, the best one is using the VirtueMart component. The VirtueMart component for Joomla!/Mambo is quite similar to Zen Cart or osCommerce. Only a few features of Zen Cart or osCommerce are missing in VirtueMart. However, if you still want to integrate Zen Cart into the existing Joomla!/Mambo website, you have two options-and neither is easier than the other: Use Zen Cart as a wrapper or, develop a component based on Zen Cart. Using Zen Cart as a wrapper is in its true sense not an integration. It runs separately and Joomla! provides a menu link. Clicking on this link will show Zen Cart in a wrapper window. If you are experienced with Joomla! or Mambo, you can figure out how a menu item can be added to show the application in a wrapper. However, adding a wrapper may appear to be an integration if you modify the Zen Cart template accordingly. As the Zen Cart shop appears in the wrapper, it would be wise not to use headers and sidebars in the Zen Cart template. Links to the categories and other menus can be provided in the headers. A separate login mechanism should also be provided in the Zen Cart template. Developing a bridge for Zen Cart and Joomla! is a hot topic in the Zen Cart forum. Users of both Joomla! and Zen Cart agree that integration or bridging of these two will be of great value. However, due to the framework of these two systems, developing such a bridge has some complexities and takes some time. Recently, a discussion on this topic has led to the development of such a bridge by the open-source enthusiasts. Please watch the following thread:http://tinyurl.com/65ypyu. Another possibility is JFusion plug-in for Joomla! (available at www.jfusion.org) which is a framework for integrating several forums to Joomla!. The developer of JFusion has proposed developing such a plug-in for Zen Cart as well. It is hoped that JFusion will be able to integrate Zen Cart to Joomla! soon. Drupal Drupal is a powerful CMS and is widely used. There are a wide range of modules available for Drupal and it is used for different types of websites. There are a great number of Drupal users who want to integrate Drupal and Zen Cart-as both are considered useful in their category. Until recently, there was no easy way to integrate Drupal and Zen Cart. Very recently, Zen Cart Integration module has been released as a development version. For now, it works on Drupal 5.x and Zen Cart 1.3.7. Once this module is installed and configured, you can create Zen Cart categories and products from Drupal. As other nodes, these products and categories will be displayed as nodes in Drupal. When visitors click on these products they see product details as a Drupal node, but when the product is added to cart, it redirects to the Zen Cart shop. This module also provides a single sign-on facility. For integrating Zen Cart into Drupal, download the module from http://drupal.org/project/zencart. Before we proceed with the integration of Drupal and Zen Cart, assume that you have installed Drupal and Zen Cart on the same server. Let us suppose, Drupal is installed in e:wwwdrupal57 directory and Zen Cart 1.3.7 is in e:wwwzc directory, and these two uses separate database on the same MySQL server. Follow these steps: Download and unzip Zen Cart integration module: For integrating Zen Cart into Drupal, download the module from http://drupal.org/project/zencart. On your computer, unzip the zencart-5.x-1.x-dev.tar.gz package. You will get a folder named zencart, under which there are some files and a subfolder named zencart. Copy files for Zen Cart: Inside the zencart subfolder you will find the includes folder. Copy this subfolder, that is /zencart/includes, to your Zen Cart installation directory, that is e:wwwzc. This will overwrite the e:wwwzcincludes directory, but will not overwrite any files. Once you have copied all the files in this folder, you are finished with Zen Cart. Install Zen Cart installation module in Drupal: Copy the zencart directory with all the files inside it, except the zencart subfolder, to Drupal's installation directory, that is e:wwwdrupal57. As an administrator in Drupal, you can install this module from Drupal's Administer | Site Building | Modules section. In the module list you will see the Zen Cart Integration module group. You will find the following modules in this group: Zencart-This is the main module for integrating Zen Cart shopping cart to Drupal. This is required by other modules in this group. Zencart Catalog-This module allows creation of Drupal nodes for Zen Cart products and categories. Zencart Category Node Hierarchy-This module depends on the Node Hierarchy module and organizes Zen Cart products and categories. Download the Node Hirarchy module from http://drupal.org/project/nodehierarchy and install it before enabling this module. To enable these modules, select checkboxes in Enabled column and click Save configuration button at the bottom of the list. Configure Zencart Integration module in Drupal: After enabling the modules, you can configure those from Administer | Site Configuration | Zencart Integration screen. The Zen Cart Status section will provide you information about your Zen Cart installation. The module will search and find the Zen Cart installation and show its version, path to Drupal installation and other information. The Zen Cart Settings section will give you the opportunity to mention the Zen Cart installation directory path. Type it into the Path to Zencart field. The Zen Cart Page Redirects section allows you to configure page redirects from the Zen Cart page to Drupal node. Zen Cart Catalog section allows you to configure redirect from the Zen Cart catalog items to Drupal. While using this integration module, you create Zen Cart catalog and products from Drupal. If you want to create these categories and products from inside Zen Cart and synchronize those with Drupal, then check Update product info on cron. This will synchronize product information both on Drupal and Zen Cart by running cron command on linux/unix. Checking Redirect Product Info Pages will automatically redirect visitors from the Zen Cart product info pages to equivalent Drupal nodes. Similarly, checking Redirect Category Listing Pages will automatically redirect visitors from the Zen Cart category pages to equivalent Drupal nodes. The Zen Cart Users section allows you to configure single sign-on options for Drupal and Zen Cart. If you want to allow Zen Cart existing customers to login to Drupal, then check the Allow Zen Cart Customers to login to Drupal checkbox. On the other hand, if you want to allow Drupal users to login to Zen Cart as customers, check Allow Drupal Users Customers to login to Zen Cart as Customers. Checking Allow Single Sign-On will allow users to login once and access both Drupal and Zen Cart.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         The Zencart Integration screen has the following sections: Once you have configured these options, click the Save configuration button, or revert to defaults by clicking the Reset to defaults button. Create Content Type in Drupal for Zen Cart categories and products: If you have ever used Drupal, you know how to create content types in Drupal. You can add new content type from Administer | Content Management | Content types | Add content type. Now you will get a Zen Cart Catalog group. From this section you can define whether this type will be used as a Zen Cart product or category. You can also configure node hierarchy-ability to be parent or child (default is parent). In the Identification section, type a human readable name, for example Zen Cart Product, in the Name field. Then type a machine readable name of this content type, for example zc_product, in the Type field. Provide a description of this content type in the Description field. In the Submission Form section, provide a label for the title and body field, minimum number of words, and explanation or submission guidelines. Configure default options in the Workflow section. Finally, click the Save content type button. Create two content types—one for the Zen Cart category and another for the Zen Cart product. Add Category and Product in Drupal: You can create categories and products from Create Content section. In the list, click on Zen Cart Category. This will open Submit Zen Cart Category form. In this form, type the category name in Title field, type a description of this category in Body field. In the Node Hierarchy section, you can select a parent category. Check Category is Active to make this category visible. Configure other options like Menu settings, URL path settings, Publishing options, and so on and click the Submit button to create the category Similarly, you can create Zen Cart products by clicking on the Zen Cart Product content type. This will display the Submit Zen Cart Product form. Fill in the Submit Zen Cart Product form with appropriate information, such as product name, model, quantity in stock, tax class, base price, and so on. You can select its parent category in the Node Hierarchy section. Check the Create Menu option to make a menu item for this product. Configure other options like Menu settings, URL path settings, Publishing options, and so on and click the Submit button to create the product. Test Zen Cart Integration to and from Drupal: Now it is time to test whether the Drupal-Zen Cart integration is working or not. First, go to your Zen Cart shop, for example, http://localhost/zc. There you will find the categories and products you have added. Click on any of these, and you will be redirected to the respective Drupal node. Again, in the Drupal, click on a product link, type a quantity and click the Add to Cart button. That will redirect you to the Zen Cart shop's Your Shopping Cart Contents page. Similarly you can test single sign-on features by signing in to either Drupal or Zen Cart and trying to purchase items from these two shops. Gallery2 Gallery2 is a web-based software product that lets you manage photos on your own website. It creates a catalog of photos which visitors can view as thumbnails as well as in its original size. It has an intuitive interface to create and maintain albums. It can create thumbnails automatically and can be used for image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching, and some other functions. You can use Gallery2 to build a community site for sharing photos. You can create the community using Gallery2 and registered users can share their photographs by uploading their own photos. You need to integrate Gallery2 with Zen Cart if you want to sell photos from your photo gallery. Gallery2 has a great mechanism to integrate with Zen Cart. The Gallery2/Zen Cart integration module is available at the Gallery2 download site http://dakanji.com/g2stuff/zcg2-3_2_1a-full.zip. Using it, users can organize their photos and other multimedia files into Gallery2, and offer them for sale through Zen Cart. In integrating Gallery2 with Zen Cart, you have to configure Zen Cart first. Follow these steps for Zen Cart: Download the Gallery2/Zen Cart Integration module and extract it. Copy the zencart/includes folder into your Zen Cart installation directory. This directory contains some templates for Zen Cart. Copying these files will not overwrite any existing file. Login to your Zen Cart administration panel and create a new product category, such as Photographs. Photo items from Gallery2 will go to this category. Select Tools | Template Selection and choose one of the Gallery2 Integration templates provided. You can take a copy of the template folder (../includes/templates/pgxxx) and modify stylesheet.css. You can also modify these templates. Edit ../includes/languages/pgxxx/english.php if you want to change language strings or date formats. Replace ../includes/templates/pgxxx/images/logo.gif with your site's logo. Remember that for Gallery2/Zen Cart integration, both Zen Cart and Gallery2 data tables need to be in one database. In Gallery2, you need to make the following changes: Upload the module files in the gallery2/ directory to your Gallery2 installation's modules directory. In Gallery2 Site Administration, click on Plugins and find Zen Cart under the Commerce heading. Then click Install. After Installation, click Configure. Enter the entire server path to your Zen Cart installation, for example, /home/your_name/public_html/zencart/. Select the category you created in Zen Cart earlier (for example Photographs) from the drop-down menu. Click activate next to the Zen Cart listing on the module page. Refresh the page and click on the Zen Cart link under Admin Options to edit product details. Edit permissions for the individual items as you wish. The module will have assigned permissions to non-album items on activation. If you do not want to sell an item, you will need to disable that item in Zen Cart as the module adds all data items in your gallery to Zen Cart. You can add photograph items from Gallery2. Adding any item to the Gallery2 album will simply show that item in Zen Cart. You can add product options from Gallery2 by clicking on the Zen Cart link in your Gallery2 site administration menu. When you have installed the Gallery2/Zen Cart bridge, you will find a product type in Zen cart named Product-Gallery. All the items from Gallery2 need to be of this type. If you edit any item from Zen Cart and change the product type of any Gallery2 item, the link with the Gallery2 will be broken. Also, note that the Gallery2 bridge will co-exist with Zen Cart image handler and lightbox add-on for Zen Cart. These will handle product images for Zen Cart, whereas Gallery2 add-on only handles images added in Gallery2. You cannot assign the Main category in Zen Cart as the root product category for Gallery2. The category you are selecting in the Gallery2 bridge configuration must be a sub-category product. Once the configurations are done, you can see the photographs from Zen Cart. Visitors can also order photographs from Zen Cart. While you are in Gallery2, you can also place an order by clicking the add to cart link, which is redirected to Zen Cart. WordPress WordPress is an extremely powerful and widely used open-source blogging platform. It has a wide community of developers and users, and almost all kinds of plugins are available for it. Although there are some shopping cart plugins for WordPress, they are not full-blown shopping carts like Zen Cart or osCommerce. E-commerce plug-ins available for WordPress have limited features. Those who are running blogs using WordPress may want to integrate it with Zen Cart to provide e-commerce functionality to their blogs. In fact, there is a Zen Cart module for integrating these two. You can download that module from www.zen-cart.com. After downloading the plug-in WordPress on Zen Cart, you have to install it on the webserver. You can install the plug-in in two ways: first, in an environment where you have a working WordPress installation, and second, when you have not installed WordPress. WordPress and Zen Cart Installed in Separate Directories When you have an existing installation of WordPress, generally it will be in a separate directory from that of the Zen Cart installation. If your web document root directory is public_html, then the installation directories may be: /public_html/blog and /public_html/shop. Follow these procedures to install WordPress on Zen Cart plug-in: Step1: Install WordPress If you have not installed WordPress yet, then download the WordPress files from www.wordpress.org and unzip the files. Then, upload the files to your webserver's /public_html/blog directory. Now, change the permission of this directory to 777 and point your browser to http://yourdomain.com/blog/wp-admin/setup-config.php. The installation wizard for WordPress will be displayed. Follow the instructions on the wizard and give the necessary information. Once all of the information is given, WordPress will be installed. Step 2: Configure WordPress During installation, an administrative account will be created. Note the username and password for this account. Then, point your browser to http://yourdomain.com/blog/wp-admin/. The login page will be displayed. Type the username and password for the administrative account and click on the Login button. You will see the dashboard for administering WordPress. Go to Options | General. Now, change the Blog Address (URL) to Zen Cart's URL http://yourdomain.com/shop/. From the administration dashboard, go to Presentation | Themes and select WordPress Default 1.6. Step 3: Upload WordPress on Zen Cart When you unzip the WordPress on Zen Cart plug-in zip file, you will find that there is a directory called ZC_ROOT and WP_ROOT. Now, upload the contents of ZC_ROOT directory to Zen Cart's installation path on the server, that is, /public_html/shop/. Similarly, upload the contents of the WP_ROOT directory to WordPress' installation path, that is, /public_html/blog. Before uploading the contents of the ZC_ROOT directory, please change the name of the /ZC_ROOT/includes/templates/MY_TEMP/ directory to that of the template directory you are using for your Zen Cart shop Step 4: Edit WordPress File For older versions of WordPress, you may need to edit the /wp-include/template-loader.php file. Open the file in a text editor and replace all exit; with return;. However, you may not need this for the newer versions of WordPress. WordPress 2.3.1 can work without this modification. First, try without this modification. Step 5: Edit Zen Cart File You also need to edit another file in the Zen Cart installation. Open the /includes/extra_configures/wordpress-config.php file under the Zen Cart installation folder and find the following line: define ('ABSPATH','/var/www/vhost/example.com/public_html/blog/'); Type the appropriate WordPress path, that is, /home/username/public_html/blog/. The above line will look like this: define ('ABSPATH','/home/suhreed/public_html/blog/'); If you are trying it on Windows, you may need to put the absolute path, as in, e:/www/blog. Step 6: Configure Sideboxes from Layout Boxes Controller Once the file modifications have been done, login to the Zen Cart administration panel. Go to Tools | Layout Boxes Controller. The screen will notify you that some new sideboxes-wp_cats.php, wp_archives.php, wp_pages.php, wp_links.php, and wp_sidebar.php-have been found. To use these sidebars, click on the reset button at the bottom. To show these sideboxes on your Zen Cart shop, click on the sidebar and change its left/right column status.

Why is Planning Important? Most open source developers see planning as a boring task. Why plan if one can just go and code? The answer is as simple as the question: The "Go and code" approach does not let us create truly optimal code. Portions of code have to be changed while other portions are written. They often lead to redundant code or uninitialized variables, partially covered conditions, and wrong return results. Code gets a "do not touch" reputation because changing anything renders the whole project unstable. Often the code works, but the project is more a failure than a success because it cannot be extended or re-used. Another reason for planning is the ease of bug fixing and the costs associated with it. Open source developers often do not think about it until they start selling their services or work to commercial companies. As shown by recent studies, the cost of problem fixing grows rapidly toward the end of the project. The cost is minimal when development has not started yet, and the person in charge just collects requirements. When requirements are collected and a programmer (or a team of programmers) starts to think how to implement these requirements, a change of requirements, or fixing a problem in the requirements still does not cost much. But it may already be difficult for developers if they came to a certain implementation approach after reviewing requirements. Things become worse at the development stage. Imagine that the selected approach was wrong and it was uncovered close to the end of development. Lots of time is lost, and work may have to start from the beginning. Now imagine what happens if the project is released to the customer and the customer says that the outcome of the project does not work as expected (something was implemented differently (as compared to expectations), or something was not implemented at all). The cost of fixing is likely to be high and overshoot the budget. Next, imagine what would happen if problems occurred when a project went live. After reading the previous paragraph, some developers may ask how the situation applies to non-commercial development, as there is a false perception that there are no costs associated with it (at least, no direct costs). But, the costs exist! And often they are much more sensitive than financial costs. The cost in non-commercial development is reputation. If a developer's product does not work well or does not work at all or it has obvious flaws, the general opinion about the developer may become bad ("cannot trust his code"). Developers will also have troubles improving because often they do not understand what has gone wrong. But the answer is near. Do not rush! Plan it well! You may even think of something about the future code, and then start coding only when the picture is clear. Planning is an important part of software development. While freelancers can usually divide their time freely between planning and implementation, many corporate developers often do not have such freedom. And even worse, many managers still do not see planning as a necessary step in software development. This situation is well explained in The parable of the two programmers, which readers of this book are encouraged to read in full. When it comes to TYPO3, planning is more important than an average application. TYPO3 is very complex, and its implementation is also complex. Without planning, programmers will most likely have to change their already written code to fix unforeseen problems therefore, good planning for TYPO3 extensions is extremely important. But let us move on and see how to plan an extension. How to Plan There are several stages in planning. Typically, each stage answers one or more important questions about development. TYPO3 developers should think about at least three stages: Gathering requirements Implementation planning Documentation planning Of course, each project is unique and has other stages. But these three stages generally exist in every project. Gathering Requirements The first thing that a developer needs to know is what his/her extension will do. While it sounds pretty obvious, not many extension authors know exactly what functionality the extension has in the end. It evolves over time, and often the initial idea is completely different from the final implementation. Predictably, neither the original nor the final is done well. In the other case, when extension features are collected, though planned and implemented according to plan, they usually fit well together. So, the very first thing to do when creating an extension is to find out what that extension should do. This is called gathering requirements. For non-commercial extensions, gathering requirements simply means writing down what each extension should do. For example, for a news extension, it may be: Show list of news sorted by date Show list of latest news Show news archive Show only a small amount of text in news list view As we have seen, gathering requirements looks easier than it actually is. The process, however, may become more complex when an extension is developed for an external customer. Alan Cooper, in his famous About Face book, shows how users, architects, and developers see the same product. From the user's perspective, it looks like a perfect circle. An architect sees something closer to an octagon. A developer creates something that looks like a polygon with many segments connected at different degrees. These differences always exist and each participating party is interested in minimizing them. A developer must not be afraid of asking questions. The cleaner picture he/she has, the better he/she will understand the customer's requirements. Implementation Planning When the requirements are gathered, it is necessary to think which blocks an extension will have. It may be blocks responsible for data fetching, presentation, conversion, and so on. In the case of TYPO3 extension implementation, planning should result in a list of Frontend (FE) plugins, Backend (BE) modules, and standalone classes. The purpose of each plug-in, module, and/or class must be clear. When thinking of FE plugins, caching issues must be taken into account. While most of the output can be cached to improve TYPO3 performance, forms processing should not be cached. Some extensions completely prevent caching of the page when processing forms. But there is a better approach, a separate FE plug-in from the non-cached output. BE modules must take into account the ease of use. Standard BE navigation is not very flexible, and this must be taken into account when planning BE modules. Certain functionalities can be moved to separate classes. This includes common functions and any public APIs that an extension provides to the other extensions. Hooks or "user functions" are usually placed in separate classes depending on the functional zone or hooked class. Documentation Planning A good extension always comes with documentation. Documentation should also be planned. Typically, manuals for extensions are created using standard templates, which have standard sections defined. While this simplifies documentation writing for extension developers, they still have to plan what they will put into these sections. TYPO3-Specific Planning There are several planning issues specific to TYPO3. Developers must take care of them before the actual development. Extension Keys Each extension must have a unique key. Extension keys can be alphanumeric and contain underscore characters. It may not start with a digit, the letter u, or the test_ prefix. However, not every combination of these symbols makes a good extension key. An extension key must be descriptive but not too long. Having personal or company prefixes is not forbidden but is not recommended. Underscores should be avoided. Abbreviations should be avoided as well, because they often do not make sense for other users. Examples of good extension keys are: news comments usertracker loginbox Examples of bad extension keys are: news_extension mycorp_ustr myverygoodextensionthatdoesalotofthings mvgetdalot john_ext div2007 Database Structure Most TYPO3 extensions use a database to load and/or store their own data. Changing the data structure during application development may seriously slow down development, or may even cause damage to data if some data is already entered into the system. Therefore, it is extremely important to think about an extension's data structure well in advance. Such thinking requires knowledge about how TYPO3 database tables are organized. Tables in TYPO3 database must have certain structures to be properly managed by TYPO3. If a table does not fulfill TYPO3 requirements, users may see error messages in the BE (especially in the Web | List module), and data may become corrupted. Every record in every TYPO3 table belongs to a certain page inside TYPO3. TYPO3 has a way to identify which page the record belongs to.