How-To Tutorials

Upstart The first new technology that I would like to outline is called Upstart. I thought it was fitting to outline this feature first because it is integral within the boot process. Without the improvements in Upstart, Ubuntu would not be able to boot as fast as it currently does. Upstart has been used, incrementally, in Ubuntu since version 6.10 but with Ubuntu 9.10 it has made the transition complete. Without going into too much detail, Upstart was designed to replace the aging System-V init system that is commonly found on Linux distributions. The idea behind Upstart is that modern systems are more dynamic and event-driven, as opposed to static and pre-defined, and the boot process should make use of that. With the previous system, System-V, each service that is started at boot-time was defined an ordered number in which to start. This has worked well enough for many years, but it can cause problems for maintainers as they have to make sure that the boot order of services is globally compatible. For example, networking needs to be enabled before network services are enabled. If these (as a simple example) get out of order, services will not be available as expected after the machine has booted. Upstart takes the simple idea that certain services rely on other services and redefines them into event-driven tasks. It is very exciting news that Ubuntu has finally completed the transition to Upstart after so many releases. This is a big step toward improving bootup performance on Ubuntu 9.10. You can read much more about Upstart at http://upstart.ubuntu.com. XSplash Ubuntu has also made another big change to the boot process with XSplash. XSplash is replacing the previous USplash, which was known to cause issues. I have noticed that XSplash seems faster, as well as addressing the compatibility issues caused by its predecessor. I think you'll also enjoy the new bootup graphic. This is another step towards Ubuntus goal of a ten-second boot process by Ubuntu 10.04, which is due out in April of 2010. While both Upstart and XSplash contribute to improved boot performance all other changes should be transparent to the end-user. All other boot related services should perform as expected, with no migration or customization on the user's part. Linux Kernel: 2.6.31 Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" has also upgraded the Linux Kernel to version 2.6.31. This version ships with Kernel Mode Settings enabled for Intel graphics cards as well as some impressive security features. Kernel mode-setting (KMS) shifts responsibility for selecting and setting up the graphics mode from the X window system to the Linux Kernel itself. When X is started, it then detects and uses the mode without any further mode changes. This promises to make booting faster, improves graphical performance and reduces screen flickering. In regards to security features, Ubuntu 9.10 enables non-exec memory in this latest version of the Linux Kernel. What does this mean? Most modern CPUs protect against executing non-executable memory regions such as heap or stacks, but require that the Linux Kernel use "PAE" addressing. This is known either as Non-eXecute (NX) or eXecute-Disable (XD). This is the default for 64bit and generic-pae kernels and this protection reduces the areas an attacker can use to perform arbitrary code execution. The protection is now partially emulated on 32-bit kernels without PAE starting in Ubuntu 9.10. In addition, Ubuntu 9.10 has also made it possible to disable the loading of any additional kernel modules once the system is running. This adds yet another layer of protections against attackers loading kernel rootkits. This feature can be enabled by setting the value of /proc/sys/kernel/modules_disabled to 1. With these security and performance additions in the 2.6.31 version of the Linux Kernel, Ubuntu promises to become a better contender on both the Desktop and the Server environments! EXT4 Filesystem The previous version of Ubuntu, version 9.04, offered the ext4 filesystem as an option, but not as a default. After six-months of testing and stabilization I am also happy to announce that ext4 will be enabled by default in Ubuntu 9.10. I have been very happy with the ext4 filesystem. I have seen impressive speed improvements over ext3, and now use ext4 on each of my systems that supports it. Again, another impressive step toward a faster and more performance-driven Ubuntu experience. AppArmor The AppArmor system in Ubuntu 9.10 features an improved parser engine that uses cache files. This greatly improves the time taken to initialize AppArmor at boot time. AppArmor also now supports 'pux' which, when specified, means a process can transition to an existing profile if one exists or simply run unconfined if not. If you're not familiar with AppArmor, it is a Mandatory Access Control application originally designed at Novell. It is now primarily community-driven, but has been the default in Ubuntu for a few releases. It continues to mature, and security profiles are pre-defined and applicable for many common applications. To find out more about AppArmor you can read the Ubuntu community documentation on using it at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AppArmor

In this article by Kae Verens, we will look at: How to install and use the DataTables plugin How to load data pages on request from the server Searching and ordering the data From time to time, you will want to show data in your website and allow the data to be sorted and searched. It always impresses me that whenever I need to do anything with jQuery, there are usually plugins available, which are exactly or close to what I need. The DataTables plugin allows sorting, filtering, and pagination on your data. Here's an example screen from the project we will build in this article. The data is from a database of cities of the world, filtered to find out if there is any place called nowhere in the world: Get your copy of DataTables from http://www.datatables.net/, and extract it into the directory datatables, which is in the same directory as the jquery.min.js file. What the DataTables plugin does is take a large table, paginate it, and allow the columns to be ordered, and the cells to be filtered. Setting up DataTables Setting up DataTables involves setting up a table so that it has distinct < thead > and < tbody > sections, and then simply running dataTable() on it. As a reminder, tables in HTML have a header and a body. The HTML elements < thead > and < tbody > are optional according to the specifications, but the DataTables plugin requires that you put them in, so that it knows what to work with. These elements may not be familiar to you, as they are usually not necessary when you are writing your web pages and most people leave them out, but DataTables needs to know what area of the table to turn into a navigation bar, and which area will contain the data, so you need to include them. Client-side code The first example in this article is purely a client-side one. We will provide the data in the same page that is demonstrating the table. Copy the following code into a file in a new demo directory and name it tables.html: <html> <head> <script src="../jquery.min.js"></script> <script src="../datatables/media/js/jquery.dataTables.js"> </script> <style type="text/css"> @import "../datatables/media/css/demo_table.css";</style> <script> $(document).ready(function(){ $('#the_table').dataTable(); }); </script> </head> <body> <div style="width:500px"> <table id="the_table"> <thead> <tr> <th>Artist / Band</th><th>Album</th><th>Song</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr><td>Muse</td> <td>Absolution</td> <td>Sing for Absolution</td> </tr> <tr><td>Primus</td> <td>Sailing The Seas Of Cheese</td> <td>Tommy the Cat</td> </tr> <tr><td>Nine Inch Nails</td> <td>Pretty Hate Machine</td> <td>Something I Can Never Have</td> </tr> <tr><td>Horslips</td> <td>The Táin</td> <td>Dearg Doom</td> </tr> <tr><td>Muse</td> <td>Absolution</td> <td>Hysteria</td> </tr> <tr><td>Alice In Chains</td> <td>Dirt</td> <td>Rain When I Die</td> </tr> <!-- PLACE MORE SONGS HERE --> </tbody> </table> </div> </body> </html> When this is viewed in the browser, we immediately have a working data table: Note that the rows are in alphabetical order according to Artist/Band. DataTables automatically sorts your data initially based on the first column. The HTML provided has a < div > wrapper around the table, set to a fixed width. The reason for this is that the Search box at the top and the pagination buttons at the bottom are floated to the right, outside the HTML table. The < div > wrapper is provided to try to keep them at the same width as the table. There are 14 entries in the HTML, but only 10 of them are shown here. Clicking the arrow on the right side at the bottom-right pagination area loads up the next page: And finally, we also have the ability to sort by column and search all data: In this screenshot, we have the data filtered by the word horslips, and have ordered Song in descending order by clicking the header twice. With just this example, you can probably manage quite a few of your lower-bandwidth information tables. By this, I mean that you could run the DataTables plugin on complete tables of a few hundred rows. Beyond that, the bandwidth and memory usage would start affecting your reader's experience. In that case, it's time to go on to the next section and learn how to serve the data on demand using jQuery and Ajax. As an example of usage, a user list might reasonably be printed entirely to the page and then converted using the DataTable plugin because, for smaller sites, the user list might only be a few tens of rows and thus, serving it over Ajax may be overkill. It is more likely, though, that the kind of information that you would really want this applied to is part of a much larger data set, which is where the rest of the article comes in! Getting data from the server The rest of the article will build up a sample application, which is a search application for cities of the world. This example will need a database, and a large data set. I chose a list of city names and their spelling variants as my data set. You can get a list of this type online by searching. The exact point at which you decide a data set is large enough to require it to be converted to serve over Ajax, instead of being printed fully to the HTML source, depends on a few factors, which are mostly subjective. A quick test is: if you only ever need to read a few pages of the data, yet there are many pages in the source and the HTML is slow to load, then it's time to convert. The database I'm using in the example is MySQL (http://www.mysql.com/). It is trivial to convert the example to use any other database, such as PostgreSQL or SQLite. For your use, here is a short list of large data sets: http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/—Links to collections of words. http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Offline_Catalogs—A list of books placed online by Project Gutenburg. http://www.world-gazetteer.com/wg.php?men=stdl—A list of all the cities in the world, including populations. The reason I chose a city name list is that I wanted to provide a realistic large example of when you would use this. In your own applications, you might also use the DataTables plugin to manage large lists of products, objects such as pages or images, and anything else that can be listed in tabular form and might be very large. The city list I found has over two million variants in it, so it is an extreme example of how to set up a searchable table. It's also a perfect example of why the Ajax capabilities of the DataTables project are important. Just to see the result, I exported all the entries into an HTML table, and the file size was 179 MB. Obviously, too large for a web page. So, let's find out how to break the information into chunks and load it only as needed. Client-side code On the client side, we do not need to provide placeholder data. Simply print out the table, leaving the < tbody > section blank, and let DataTables retrieve the data from the server. We're starting a new project here, so create a new directory in your demos section and save the following into it as tables.html: <html> <head> <script src="../jquery.min.js"></script> <script src="../datatables/media/js/jquery.dataTables.js"> </script> <style type="text/css"> @import "../datatables/media/css/demo_table.css"; table{width:100%} </style> <script> $(document).ready(function(){ $('#the_table').dataTable({ 'sAjaxSource':'get_data.php' }); }); </script> </head> <body> <div style="width:500px"> <table id="the_table"> <thead> <tr> <th>Country</th> <th>City</th> <th>Latitude</th> <th>Longitude</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> </tbody> </table> </div> </body> </html> In this example, we've added a parameter to the .dataTable call, sAjaxSource, which is the URL of the script that will provide the data (the file will be named get_data.php). Server-side code On the server side, we will start off by providing the first ten rows from the database. DataTables expects the data to be returned as a two-dimensional array named aaData. In my own database, I've created a table like this: CREATE TABLE `cities` ( `ccode` char(2) DEFAULT NULL, `city` varchar(87) DEFAULT NULL, `longitude` float DEFAULT NULL, `latitude` float DEFAULT NULL, KEY `city` (`city`(5)) ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 Most of the searching will be done on city names, so I've indexed city. Initially, let's just extract the first page of information. Create a file called get_data.php and save it in the same directory as tables.html: <?php // { initialise variables $amt=10; $start=0; // } // { connect to database function dbRow($sql){ $q=mysql_query($sql); $r=mysql_fetch_array($q); return $r; } function dbAll($sql){ $q=mysql_query($sql); while($r=mysql_fetch_array($q))$rs[]=$r; return $rs; } mysql_connect('localhost','username','password'); mysql_select_db('phpandjquery'); // } // { count existing records $r=dbRow('select count(ccode) as c from cities'); $total_records=$r['c']; // } // { start displaying records echo '{"iTotalRecords":'.$total_records.', "iTotalDisplayRecords":'.$total_records.', "aaData":['; $rs=dbAll("select ccode,city,longitude,latitude from cities order by ccode,city limit $start,$amt"); $f=0; foreach($rs as $r){ if($f++) echo ','; echo '["',$r['ccode'],'", "',addslashes($r['city']),'", "',$r['longitude'],'", "',$r['latitude'],'"]'; } echo ']}'; // } In a nutshell, what happens is that the script counts how many cities are there in total, and then returns that count along with the first ten entries to the client browser using JSON as the transport.

WordPress As I mentioned before, WordPress is the biggest scoring free service that you can use. It is also the only one that doesn't allow you to spam their system and use it just for promotional actions. All the other services mentioned earlier allow you to monetize your blog or web site. Some share a portion of their revenue as well. So, if you want to make some money on the side, these services will provide you with the possibility to do so. WordPress doesn't allow you to build blogs just for Search Engine Optimization and I quote: We have a very low tolerance for blogs created purely for Search Engine Optimization or commercial purposes, machine-generated blogs, and will continue to nuke them. So if that's what you're interested in, WordPress is not for you. A self-hosted solution would be much more appropriate for you; suitable hosts can be found at http://www.wordpress.org/ hosting. Also see the following text taken from http://support.wordpress.com/advertising: This might be just one of the reasons that Google loves WORDPRESS.COM blogs. So how is it possible to use WORDPRESS.COM to promote your website? Actually, you don't. On this service you are not going the promote your site in a way that you can do on the other services. On WORDPRESS.COM you truly build a blog or site containing pages with true value to the visitors of that blog. You can create an About page where you put a link to your main website and in that way show the readers where to get more information. You can also put a link to your website in the link section (Blogroll) together with a few other relevant links that contain valid information. Blogging on WordPress and your ranking If you cannot promote your web site in a big way then what is the point of creating a blog on WORDPRESS.COM? A blog on WordPress can rank highly for the topic that you are blogging about and will give you some SEO love through those rankings. What is more important is the fact that you can take a special topic from your main web site's topic and create a blog around that. If you write your blog posts well and start to rank on that topic you will be seen as an authority on that topic and people will want to know more about you. That is the main reason to invest time to blog on WORDPRESS.COM to be recognized as an authority in your field of expertise. As you took only one topic out of all the topics that your site is about, you can do it again for another topic as well. You could also see these blogs as a collection of topic silos that create an array of highly related web sites that point to yours. This kind of link building takes time, and a lot of it! Is it worth it? Yes most certainly, and in more ways than one. With blogging you can achieve the following: An authority status if you do it right More traffic to your web site Better rankings in the search engines More insight into what the visitors of your web site are looking for To interact with other people having interest in the same topic as you Fun in writing and that will reflect on your site as you want to create more content on that site as well There is also a downside that you have to consider—it takes time away from building content on your main site and you have to cover more locations to maintain in the beginning. If you use that blog to write some timeless quality content on a niche part of your main site you will find out that you can stop maintaining those blogs after a short period of time. Remember, these are valid blogs to build incoming links to your main site! Digging deeper into WORDPRESS.COM blogs Creating a blog on WordPress is also very simple, go to WORDPRESS.COM and get a blog. Wait! Don't go yet! You need a few guidelines to start. Your initial user account name is going to be the first part of your URL, so name it right and remember, you cannot use a "-" in your username. My first account was seo4joomla so what I got was seo4joomla.wordpress.com. When you are logged in to WORDPRESS.COM and you type in the URL with a new keyword that you want (if it is not taken); you will get the option to add that blog to your account so that you can manage all of your WordPress.COM blogs from one place. Think about the title of your blog, if you want to change it later you can do that in the settings panel. Once you have your new blog, start cleaning. Delete the sample post and the comment along with it. Delete all the links in the blogroll (unless you are going to write about WordPress). Change the base post category from Uncategorized to a relevant topic name. Change the name of the links category from Blogroll to your most relevant keyword. Delete the About page and create a new one with the keywords of your blog in the title. That way your URL (page slug in WordPress) is containing the same keywords. Choose a nice theme layout that fits your topic, and if possible use a customized header. Using a customized header will give your site a slightly different look from the other WORDPRESS.COM web sites. Change the tagline in the general settings and start writing the way you do on your web site!   Using free blogging services As you saw, there are several blogging platforms and free web site building platforms that you can use to promote your web site. There are a lot more out there on the Internet, but you need to look for the ones that rank well in the search engines before you put your valued time into building a linking "empire". These services are free of charge and sometimes live on the revenue that comes from the blog content they host. If you don't want to be on such a platform where there are advertisements around your writing, don't use them. If you are afraid that you can lose your blog on such sites look for a way to make backups (for example, on WORDPRESS.COM you can use the Export function). How to minimize your blog writing time Keeping content fresh and up-to-date on all the blogs that you build is not that difficult. If you focus on blogging on your own web site, you should try to integrate the RSS Feed from your web site into those blog pages. RSS Feeds are the best possible automatic way of updating one-to-many, so use it to your advantage. Using your best content for link building Use the best articles from your web site to get into the picture of social bookmarking web sites. Find the most visited pages and the pages with the greatest number of comments, if you have a blog on your Joomla! site. Go to bookmarking sites and bookmark your pages using your own account. There are a lot of bookmarking web sites that you can use, just make sure you send your bookmarks to at least the following: Delicous Digg Reddit Newsvine Bloglines StumbleUpon These are some of the most influential ones that count towards your search engine ranking and are a great way to get traffic. Traffic from this kind of web site will come in bursts and mostly will not span a longer time period than a few days. The real power lies in the long term effect. Writing articles for links If you like writing about your passion, you can consider writing articles and submitting them to article publishing services. People are always looking for information and, if you can provide that to them in a smart way, it will help you to gain recognition as a field expert. You don't have to write long articles, but they must be informative and should give the reader an answer to a question they might have. Write those articles and submit them to services such as: www.thewhir.com www.ideamarketers.com www.goarticles.com www.ezinearticles.com Each of those services have their own "Terms of Service" that you should read before submitting your articles. They have their quality guidelines as well. The length of the article might need to be of a certain minimum or maximum number of characters. You might not be permitted to link deeper into your web site than the top level. Get that information before you choose a service to work with. Depending on the number of webmasters that will use your articles to republish, you could get a lot more incoming links from just a few well-written articles. What you should NOT do is take an old article from your site and send it as an article to be republished. That could backfire, as the services mentioned have a clause in their "Terms of Service" stating that the article is original and not published before. You should really not republish an already submitted article on your own web site, it could give your site a duplicate content penalty as that article will be published all over the Internet (with your link in it). An alternative could be that you publish some of your articles combined and rewritten into an e-book in PDF format that you give away for free from your web site.  

Time for action – animating projections Your project manager wants you to animate the perspective transform applied to the video while it is being reproduced. We are going to add a StoryBoard in XAML code to animate the PlaneProjection instance: Stay in the project, 3DInvadersSilverlight. Open MainPage.xaml and replace the PlaneProjection definition with the following line (we have to add a name to refer to it): <PlaneProjection x:Name ="proIntroduction" RotationX="-40" RotationY="15" RotationZ="-6" LocalOffsetX="-70" LocalOffsetY="-105" /> Add the following lines of code before the end of the definition of the cnvVideo Canvas: <Canvas.Resources>    <Storyboard x_Name="introductionSB">        <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="proIntroduction"                Storyboard.TargetProperty="RotationX"                From="-40" To="0" Duration="0:0:5"                AutoReverse="False" RepeatBehavior="1x" />    </Storyboard></Canvas.Resources> Now, add the following line of code before the end of the PlayIntroductoryVideo method (to start the animation): introductionSB.Begin(); Build and run the solution. Click on the butt on and the video will start its reproduction after the transition effect. While the video is being played, the projection will be animated, as shown in the following diagram: What just happened? Now, the projection that shows the video is animated while the video is being reproduced. Working with a StoryBoard in XAML to animate a projection First, we added a name to the existing PlaneProjection (proIntroduction). Then, we were able to create a new StoryBoard with a DoubleAnimation instance as a child, with the StoryBoard's TargetName set to proIntroduction and its TargetProperty set to RotationX. Thus, the DoubleAnimation controls proIntroduction's RotationX value. The RotationX value will go from -40 to 0 in five seconds—the same time as the video's duration: From="-40" To="0" Duration="0:0:5" The animation will run once (1x) and it won't reverse its behavior: AutoReverse="False" RepeatBehavior="1x" We added the StoryBoard inside . Thus, we were able to start it by calling its Begin method, in the PlayIntroductionVideo procedure: introductionSB.Begin(); We can define StoryBoard instances and different Animation (System. Windows.Media.Animation) subclasses instances as DoubleAnimation, using XAML code. This way, we can create amazing animations for many properties of many other UIElements defined in XAML code.   Time for action – solving navigation problems When the game starts, there is an undesired side effect. The projected video appears in the right background, as shown in the following screenshot: This usually happens when working with projections. Now, we are going to solve this small problem: Stay in the 3DInvadersSilverlight project. Open MainPage.xaml.cs and add the following line before the first one in the medIntroduction_MediaEnded method: cnvVideo.Visibility = Visibility.Collapsed; Build and run the solution. Click on the button and after the video reproduction and animation, the game will start without the undesired background, as shown in the following screenshot: What just happened? Now, once the video finishes its reproduction and associated animation, we have hidden the Canvas that contains it. Hence, there are no parts of the previous animation visible when the game starts. Time for action – reproducing music Great games have appealing background music. Now, we are going to search and add background music to our game: As with other digital content, sound and music have a copyright owner and a license. Hence, we must be very careful when downloading sound and music for our games. We must read licenses before deploying our games with these digital contents embedded. One of the 3D digital artists found a very cool electro music sample for reproduction as background music. You have to pay to use it. However, you can download a free demo (Distorted velocity. 1) from http://www.musicmediatracks.com/music/Style/Electro/. Save the downloaded MP3 file (distorted_velocity._1.mp3) in the previously created media folder (C:Silverlight3DInvaders3DMedia). You can use any other MP3 sound for this exercise. The aforementioned MP3 demo is not included in the accompanying source code. Stay in the 3DInvadersSilverlight project. Right-click on the Media sub-folder in the 3DInvadersSilverlight.Web project and select Add | Existing item… from the context menu that appears. Go to the folder in which you copied the downloaded MP3 file (C:Silverlight3DInvaders3DMedia). Select the MP3 file and click on Add. This way, the audio file will be part of the web project, in the Media folder, as shown in the following screenshot: Now, add the following lines of code at the beginning of the btnStartGame button's Click event. This code will enable the new background music to start playing: // Background musicMediaElement backgroundMusic = new MediaElement();LayoutRoot.Children.Add(backgroundMusic);backgroundMusic.Volume = 0.8;backgroundMusic.Source = new Uri("Media/distorted_velocity._1.mp3", UriKind.Relative);backgroundMusic.Play(); Build and run the solution. Click on the button and turn on your speakers. You will hear the background music while the transition effect starts.

FeedBurner FeedBurner can be used to track the number of RSS feed subscribers you have and how many of those subscribers are actively engaged with your feed. Setting up FeedBurner is quite simple, although you will need to register for an account at http://feedburner.google.com. If you already have an account at the old Feedburner.com site, you can move the feeds to your Google account when you sign in. Time for action – let's burn some feeds Download the Feedburner FeedSmith plugin from http://feedburner.google.com/fb/static/feedburner_feedsmith_plugin_2.3.zip . Upload the plugin's PHP file to /wp-content/plugins. Activate the plugin for yourself, then for all other users. Log in to Feedburner.google.com and add your site's feed to your FeedBurner account by entering the URL into the Burn a feed right this instant box. In most cases the default title and address should be fine; you may want to change the address if yours is too cumbersome. For Slayercafe.com, FeedBurner picked http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TheSlayerCafe, which is nice and easy to remember. On the next screen, tick the box to allow FeedBurner to track Clickthroughs and Reach. Go to the Publicize tab and activate the FeedCount feature. On your main blog, go to the Settings | FeedBurner screen and paste the URL you created in step 5 into the FeedBurner box. Install the FeedBurner Widget available at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedburner-widget/. On the Appearance | Widgets page, add the widget just above the normal RSS feed, and set it up like shown in the following screenshot. You should now have two subscription options on your front page. Once your site starts getting subscribers, you should see some useful statistics on the FeedBurner Analyze page. What's my feed URL?If you aren't sure what your feed's URL is, check out the following list: RSS 2.0: http://www.mydomain.tld/feed/ RSS 2.0: http://www.mydomain.tld/feed/rss2/ RSS 0.92: http://www.mydomain.tld/feed/rss RDF/RSS 1.0: http://www.mydomain.tld/feed/rdf Atom: http://www.mydomain.tld/feed/atom All of the above feed types are offered by WordPress MU. The RSS 2.0 feed will be the one that is most frequently asked for by directories and aggregators; however, it is useful to know the address of the other feeds in case a site requests them. What just happened? We have just set up two different ways for people to subscribe to the main blog, and we have offered our blog network's users the chance to do the same with their blogs. Our users will need to create their own FeedBurner accounts, but the rest of the work has been done for them—they just need to add the right widgets to their page. Offering two different ways to subscribe may seem strange, especially when you consider that the count shown by FeedBurner is inaccurate because it doesn't track people who subscribed using the direct link. The reason I have chosen to do it this way is because FeedBurner offers some useful statistics, such as how many people clicked through and which readers they are using, about the users that have subscribed via its feeds. If you find that you have a huge number of subscribers but they are never clicking on articles, then perhaps your headlines aren't enticing enough. FeedBurner also tracks Uncommon Uses—for example, someone scraping your feed to use as free content for a spam blog. If FeedBurner is so useful, then why offer an alternative? Well, not all RSS readers can understand FeedBurner feeds. This is especially true if your site expects a lot of visitors from people using older mobile devices. Offering a plain old RSS feed option is a good idea; otherwise, you will lose those subscribers entirely. Remember that if FeedBurner ever goes down, your FeedBurner subscribers will not be able to read your RSS feed. In my experience as a subscriber, FeedBurner is a reliable service; as you would expect because the service is now owned by Google, and I feel that the usefulness of the statistics it offers outweighs the risk of downtime. You may feel differently about using a third-party service to manage your feeds. If you cannot afford any downtime, then perhaps serving your feeds directly is a better option. Have a go hero – offering more RSS options If you think that the Add to Any butt on is too intrusive, or if you want to offer subscribe links in more than one place (for example, as a widget in the sidebar and also as a link at the bottom of a post), then you can use the following text link code to add the different kinds of feed links. Link Format <?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?> RSS 2.0 <?php bloginfo('rss_url'); ?> RSS 0.92 <?php bloginfo('rdf_url'); ?> RSS 1.0 <?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?> Atom <?php bloginfo('comments_rss2_url'); ?> RSS Feed For Comments   You can use the code presented in this table anywhere you would like to have the RSS icons appear. Personally, I like to display the RSS icons in a prominent position in the right sidebar by editing r_sidebar.php.

A game needs sound, music and video. It has to offer the player attractive background music. It must also generate sounds associated with certain game events. When a spaceship shoots a laser beam, a sound must accompany this action. Reproducing videos showing high-quality previously rendered animations is a good idea during transitions between one stage and the next. Hear the UFOs coming So far, we have worked with 3D scenes showing 3D models with textures and different kinds of lights. We took advantage of C# object-oriented capabilities and we animated 3D models and moved the cameras. We have read values from many different input devices and we added physics, artificial intelligence, amazing effects, gauges, statistics, skill levels, environments, and stages. However, the game does not use the speakers at all because there is no background music and there are no in-game sounds. Thus, we have to sort this issue out. Modern games use videos to dazzle the player before starting each new stage. They use amazing sound eff ects and music custom prepared for the game by renowned artists. How can we add videos, music, and sounds in Silverlight? We can do this by taking advantage of the powerful multimedia classes offered by Silverlight 3. However, as a game uses more multimedia resources than other simpler applications, we must be careful to avoid including unnecessary resources in the files that must be downloaded before starting the application. Time for action – installing tools to manipulate videos The 3D digital artists used Blender to create an introductory video showing a high quality rendered animation for five seconds. They took advantage of Blender's animation creation features, as shown in the following screenshot: A spaceship flies in a starry universe for a few seconds. Then, the camera navigates through the stars. Your project manager wants you to add this video as an introduction to the game. However, as the video file is in AVI (Audio Video Interleave) format and Silverlight 3 does not support this format, you have to convert the video to an appropriate format. The creation of video animations for a game is very complex and requires specialist skills. We are going to simplify this process by using an existing video. First, we must download and install an additional tool that will help us in converting an existing video to the most appropriate file formats used in Silverlight 3: The necessary tools will depend on the applications the digital artists use to create the videos. However, we will be using some tools that will work fine with our examples. Download one of the following files: parceApplication's name Download link File name Description Expression Encoder 2 http://www.microsoft.com/expression/try-it/try-it-v2.aspx Encoder_Trial_en.exe It is a commercial tool, but the trial offers a free fully functional version for 30 days. This tool will enable us to encode videos to the appropriate format to use in Silverlight 3. Expression Encoder 3 http://www.microsoft.com/expression/try-it Encoder_Trial_en.exe It is the newest trial version of the aforementioned commercial tool. Run the installers and follow the steps to complete the installation wizards. If you installed Expression Encoder 2, download and install its Service Pack 1. The download link for it is http://www.microsoft.com/expression/tryit/try-it-v2.aspx#encodersp1 file name—EncoderV2SP1_en.exe. Once you have installed one of the versions of Expression Encoder, you will be able to load and encode many video files in different file formats, as shown in the following screenshot:

The basis for all of these topics is the object-oriented interface. Object-oriented versus MATLAB styles We have seen  a lot of examples, and in all of them we used the matplotlib.pyplot module to create and manipulate the plots, but this is not the only way to make use of the Matplotlib plotting power. There are three ways to use Matplotlib: pyplot: The module used so far in this article pylab:  A module to merge Matplotlib and NumPy together in an environment closer to MATLAB Object-oriented way: The Pythonic way to interface with Matplotlib Let's first elaborate a bit about the pyplot module: pyplot provides a MATLAB-style, procedural, state-machine interface to the underlying object-oriented library in Matplotlib. A state machine is a system with a global status, where each operation performed on the system changes its status. matplotlib.pyplot is stateful because the underlying engine keeps track of the current figure and plotting area information, and plotting functions change that information. To make it clearer, we did not use any object references during our plotting we just issued a pyplot command, and the changes appeared in the figure. At a higher level, matplotlib.pyplot is a collection of commands and functions that make Matplotlib behave like MATLAB (for plotting). This is really useful when doing interactive sessions, because we can issue a command and see the result immediately, but it has several drawbacks when we need something more such as low-level customization or application embedding. If we remember, Matplotlib started as an alternative to MATLAB, where we have at hand both numerical and plotting functions. A similar interface exists for Matplotlib, and its name is pylab. pylab (do you see the similarity in the names?) is a companion module, installed next to matplotlib that merges matplotlib.pyplot (for plotting) and numpy (for mathematical functions) modules in a single namespace to  provide an environment as near to MATLAB as possible, so that the transition would be easy. We and the authors of Matplotlib discourage the use of pylab, other than for proof-of-concept snippets. While being rather simple to use, it teaches developers the wrong way to use Matplotlib. The third way to use Matplotlib is through the object-oriented interface (OO, from now on). This is the most powerful way to write Matplotlib code because it allows for complete control of the result however it is also the most complex. This is the Pythonic way to use Matplotlib, and it's highly encouraged when programming with Matplotlib rather than working interactively. We will use it a lot from now on as it's needed to go down deep into Matplotlib. Please allow us to highlight again the preferred style that the author of this article, and the authors of Matplotlib want to enforce: a bit of pyplot will be used, in particular for convenience functions, and the remaining plotting code is either done with the OO style or with pyplot, with numpy explicitly imported and used for numerical functions. In this preferred style, the initial imports are: import matplotlib.pyplot as pltimport numpy as np In this way, we know exactly which module the function we use comes from (due to the module prefix), and it's exactly what we've always done in the code so far. Now, let's present the same piece of code expressed in the three possible forms which we just described. First, we present it in the style, pyplot only: In [1]: import matplotlib.pyplot as pltIn [2]: import numpy as npIn [3]: x = np.arange(0, 10, 0.1)In [4]: y = np.random.randn(len(x))In [5]: plt.plot(x, y)Out[5]: [<matplotlib.lines.Line2D object at 0x1fad810>]In [6]: plt.title('random numbers')In [7]: plt.show() The preceding code snippet results in: Now, let's see how we can do the same thing using the pylab interface: $ ipython -pylab... In [1]: x = arange(0, 10, 0.1)In [2]: y = randn(len(x)) In [3]: plot(x, y)Out[3]: [<matplotlib.lines.Line2D object at 0x4284dd0>] In [4]: title('random numbers')In [5]: show() Note that: ipython -pylab is not the same as running ipython and then: from pylab import * This is because ipython's-pylab switch, in addition to importing everything from pylab, also enables a specific ipython threading mode so that both the interactive interpreter and the plot window can be active at the same time. Finally, lets make the same chart by using OO style, but with some pyplot convenience functions: In [1]: import matplotlib.pyplot as pltIn [2]: import numpy as np In [3]: x = np.arange(0, 10, 0.1)In [4]: y = np.random.randn(len(x))In [5]: fig = plt.figure()In [6]: ax = fig.add_subplot(111)In [7]: l, = plt.plot(x, y)In [8]: t = ax.set_title('random numbers')In [9]: plt.show() The pylab code is the simplest, and ,pyplot is in the middle, while the OO is the most complex or verbose. As the Python Zen teaches us, "Explicit is better than implicit" and "Simple is better than complex" and those statements are particularly true for this example: for simple interactive sessions, pylab or ,pyplot are the perfect choice because they hide a lot of complexity, but if we need something more advanced, then the OO API makes clearer where things are coming from, and what's going on. This expressiveness will be appreciated when we will embed Matplotlib inside GUI applications. From now on, we will start presenting our code using the OO interface mixed with some pyplot functions. A brief introduction to Matplotlib objects Before we can go on in a productive way, we need to briefly introduce which Matplotlib objects compose a figure. Let's see from the higher levels to the lower ones how objects are nested: Object Description FigureCanvas Container class for the Figure instance Figure Container for one or more Axes instances Axes The rectangular areas to hold the basic elements, such as lines, text, and so on     Our first (simple) example of OO Matplotlib In the previous pieces of code, we had transformed this: ...In [5]: plt.plot(x, y)Out[5]: [<matplotlib.lines.Line2D object at 0x1fad810>]... into: ...In [7]: l, = plt.plot(x, y)... The new code uses an explicit reference, allowing a lot more customizations. As we can see in the first piece of code, the plot() function returns a list of Line2D instances, one for each line (in this case, there is only one), so in the second code, l is a reference to the line object, so every operation allowed on Line2D can be done using l. For example, we can set the line color with: l.set_color('red') Instead of using the keyword argument to plot(), so the line information can be changed after the plot() call. Subplots In the previous section, we have seen a couple of important functions without introducing them. Let's have a look at them now: fig = plt.figure(): This function returns a Figure, where we can add one or more Axes instances. ax = fig.add_subplot(111): This function returns an Axes instance, where we can plot (as done so far), and this is also the reason why we call the variable referring to that instance ax (from Axes). This is a common way to add an Axes to a Figure, but add_subplot() does a bit more: it adds a subplot. So far we have only seen a Figure with one Axes instance, so only one area where we can draw, but Matplotlib allows more than one. add_subplot() takes three parameters: fig.add_subplot(numrows, numcols, fignum) where: numrows  represents the number of rows of subplots to prepare numcols  represents the number of columns of subplots to prepare fignum  varies from 1 to numrows*numcols and specifies the current subplot (the one used now) Basically, we describe a matrix of numrows*numcols subplots that we want into the Figure; please note that fignum is 1 at the upper-left corner of the Figure and it's equal to numrows*numcols at the bottom-right corner. The following table should provide a visual explanation of this:   numrows=2, numcols=2, fignum=1 numrows=2, numcols=2, fignum=2 numrows=2, numcols=2, fignum=3 numrows=2, numcols=2, fignum=4

Embedding a progress bar in a status bar This topic explains how to embed a progress bar in a panel's status bar, a scenario found in countless user interfaces: How to do it Create a click handler that will simulate a long-running activity and update the progress bar: Ext.onReady(function() { var loadFn = function(btn, statusBar) { btn = Ext.getCmp(btn); btn.disable(); Ext.fly('statusTxt').update('Saving...'); pBar.wait({ interval: 200, duration: 5000, increment: 15, fn: function() { btn.enable(); Ext.fly('statusTxt').update('Done'); } });}; Create an instance of the progress bar: var pBar = new Ext.ProgressBar({ id: 'pBar', width: 100}); Create a host panel and embed the progress bar in the bbar of the panel. Also, add a button that will start the progress bar updates: var pnl = new Ext.Panel({ title: 'Status bar with progress bar', renderTo: 'pnl1', width: 400, height: 200, bodyStyle: 'padding:10px;', items: [{ xtype: 'button', id: 'btn', text: 'Save', width:'75', handler: loadFn.createCallback('btn', 'sBar') }], bbar: { id: 'sBar', items: [{ xtype: 'tbtext', text: '',id:'statusTxt' },'->', pBar] }}); How it works The first step consists of creating loadFn, a function that simulates a long-running operation, so that we can see the progress bar animation when the button is clicked. The heart of loadFn is a call to ProgressBar.wait(…), which initiates the progress bar in an auto-update mode. And this is how the status bar is embedded in the bbar of the panel: bbar: { id: 'sBar', items: [{ xtype: 'tbtext', text: '',id:'statusTxt' },'->', pBar] Observe how the progress bar is sent to the rightmost location in the status bar with the help of a Toolbar.Fill instance, declared with '->'. Creating a custom look for the status bar items Customizing the look of toolbar items is relatively simple. In this recipe, you will learn how to create toolbar items with a sunken look that can be found in many desktop applications: How to do it Create the styles that will provide the custom look of the status bar text items: .custom-status-text-panel{ border-top:1px solid #99BBE8; border-right:1px solid #fff; border-bottom:1px solid #fff; border-left:1px solid #99BBE8; padding:1px 2px 2px 1px;} Create a host panel: Ext.onReady(function() { var pnl = new Ext.Panel({ title: 'Status bar with sunken text items', renderTo: 'pnl1', width: 400, height: 200, bodyStyle: 'padding:10px;', Define the panel's bbar with the text items: bbar: { id: 'sBar', items: [ { id: 'cachedCount', xtype:'tbtext', text: 'Cached: 15' }, ' ', { id: 'uploadedCount', xtype: 'tbtext', text: 'Uploaded: 7' }, ' ', { id: 'invalidCount', xtype: 'tbtext', text: 'Invalid: 2' } ]}, Now, add a handler for the afterrender event and use it to modify the styles of the text items: listeners: { 'afterrender': { fn: function() { Ext.fly(Ext.getCmp('cachedCount').getEl()).parent(). addClass('custom-status-text-panel'); Ext.fly(Ext.getCmp('uploadedCount').getEl()).parent(). addClass('custom-status-text-panel'); Ext.fly(Ext.getCmp('invalidCount').getEl()).parent(). addClass('custom-status-text-panel'); }, delay:500 }} How it works The actual look of the items is defined by the style in the custom-status-text-panel CSS class. After the host panel and toolbar are created and rendered, the look of the items is changed by applying the style to each of the TD elements that contain the items. For example: Ext.fly(Ext.getCmp('uploadedCount').getEl()).parent(). addClass('custom-status-text-panel'); See also... The previous recipe, Embedding a progress bar in a status bar, explains how a progress bar can be embedded in a panel's status bar Using a progress bar to indicate that your application is busy In this topic, you will learn how to use a progress bar to indicate that your application is busy performing an operation. The next screenshot shows a progress bar built using this recipe: How to do it Define the progress bar: Ext.onReady(function() { Ext.QuickTips.init(); var pBar = new Ext.ProgressBar({ id: 'pBar', width: 300, renderTo: 'pBarDiv'}); Add a handler for the update event and use it to update the wait message: pBar.on('update', function(val) { //Handle this event if you need to // execute code at each progress interval. Ext.fly('pBarText').dom.innerHTML += '.';}); Create a click handler for the button that will simulate a long-running activity: var btn = Ext.get('btn');btn.on('click', function() { Ext.fly('pBarText').update('Please wait'); btn.dom.disabled = true; pBar.wait({ interval: 200, duration: 5000, increment: 15, fn: function() { btn.dom.disabled = false; Ext.fly('pBarText').update('Done'); } });}); Add the button to the page: <button id="btn">Start long-running operation</button> How it works After creating the progress bar, the handler for its update event is created. While I use this handler simply to update the text message, you can use it to execute some other code every time that a progress interval occurs. The click handler for the button calls the progress bar's wait(…) function, which causes the progress bar to auto-update at the configured interval and reset itself after the configured duration: pBar.wait({ interval: 200, duration: 5000, increment: 15, fn: function() { btn.dom.disabled = false; Ext.fly('pBarText').update('Done'); }}); There's more The progress bar can also be configured to run indefinitely by not passing the duration config option. Clearing the progress bar in this scenario requires a call to the reset() function. See also... The next recipe, Using a progress bar to report progress updates, illustrates how a progress bar can be set up to notify the user that progress is being made in the execution of an operation The Changing the look of a progress bar recipe (covered later in this article) shows you how easy it is to change the look of the progress bar using custom styles Summary This article consisted recipes that examined the commonly-used menu items, as well as the different ways of setting up toolbars and progress bars in your applications. [ 1 | 2 ] If you have read this article you may be interested to view :   Making Progress with Menus and Toolbars using Ext JS 3.0: Part 1 Load, Validate, and Submit Forms using Ext JS 3.0: Part 1 Load, Validate, and Submit Forms using Ext JS 3.0: Part 2 Load, Validate, and Submit Forms using Ext JS 3.0: Part 3

Loading form data from the server An important part of working with forms is loading the data that a form will display. Here's how to create a sample contact form and populate it with data sent from the server. How to do it... Declare the name and company panel: var nameAndCompany = { columnWidth: .5, layout: 'form', items: [ { xtype: 'textfield', fieldLabel: 'First Name', name: 'firstName', anchor: '95%' }, { xtype: 'textfield', fieldLabel: 'Last Name', name: 'lastName', anchor: '95%' }, { xtype: 'textfield', fieldLabel: 'Company', name: 'company', anchor: '95%' }, { xtype: 'textfield', fieldLabel: 'Title', name: 'title', anchor: '95%' } ]} Declare the picture box panel: var picBox = { columnWidth: .5, bodyStyle: 'padding:0px 0px 0px 40px', items: [ { xtype: 'box', autoEl: { tag: 'div', style: 'padding-bottom:20px', html: '<img id="pic" src="' + Ext.BLANK_IMAGE_URL + '" class="img-contact" />' } }, { xtype: 'button', text: 'Change Picture' } ]} Define the Internet panel: var internet = { columnWidth: .5, layout: 'form', items: [ { xtype: 'fieldset', title: 'Internet', autoHeight: true, defaultType: 'textfield', items: [{ fieldLabel: 'Email', name: 'email', vtype: 'email', anchor: '95%' }, { fieldLabel: 'Web page', name: 'webPage', vtype: 'url', anchor: '95%' }, { fieldLabel: 'IM', name: 'imAddress', anchor: '95%' }] }]} Declare the phone panel: var phones = { columnWidth: .5, layout: 'form', items: [{ xtype: 'fieldset', title: 'Phone Numbers', autoHeight: true, defaultType: 'textfield', items: [{ fieldLabel: 'Home', name: 'homePhone', anchor: '95%' }, { fieldLabel: 'Business', name: 'busPhone', anchor: '95%' }, { fieldLabel: 'Mobile', name: 'mobPhone', anchor: '95%' }, { fieldLabel: 'Fax', name: 'fax', anchor: '95%' }] }]} Define the business address panel: var busAddress = { columnWidth: .5, layout: 'form', labelAlign: 'top', defaultType: 'textarea', items: [{ fieldLabel: 'Business', labelSeparator:'', name: 'bAddress', anchor: '95%' }, { xtype: 'radio', boxLabel: 'Mailing Address', hideLabel: true, name: 'mailingAddress', value:'bAddress', id:'mailToBAddress' }]} Define the home address panel: var homeAddress = { columnWidth: .5, layout: 'form', labelAlign: 'top', defaultType: 'textarea', items: [{ fieldLabel: 'Home', labelSeparator:'', name: 'hAddress', anchor: '95%' }, { xtype: 'radio', boxLabel: 'Mailing Address', hideLabel: true, name: 'mailingAddress', value:'hAddress', id:'mailToHAddress' }]} Create the contact form: var contactForm = new Ext.FormPanel({ frame: true, title: 'TODO: Load title dynamically', bodyStyle: 'padding:5px', width: 650, items: [{ bodyStyle: { margin: '0px 0px 15px 0px' }, items: [{ layout: 'column', items: [nameAndCompany, picBox] }] }, { items: [{ layout: 'column', items: [phones, internet] }] }, { xtype: 'fieldset', title: 'Addresses', autoHeight: true, hideBorders: true, layout: 'column', items: [busAddress, homeAddress] }], buttons: [{ text: 'Save' }, { text: 'Cancel' }]}); Handle the form's actioncomplete event: contactForm.on({ actioncomplete: function(form, action){ if(action.type == 'load'){ var contact = action.result.data; Ext.getCmp(contact.mailingAddress).setValue(true); contactForm.setTitle(contact.firstName + ' ' + contact.lastName); Ext.getDom('pic').src = contact.pic; } }}); Render the form: contactForm.render(document.body); Finally, load the form: contactForm.getForm().load({ url: 'contact.php', params:{id:'contact1'}, waitMsg: 'Loading'}); How it works... The contact form's building sequence consists of defining each of the contained panels, and then defining a form panel that will serve as a host. The following screenshot shows the resulting form, with the placement of each of the panels pinpointed: Moving on to how the form is populated, the JSON-encoded response to a request to provide form data has a structure similar to this: {success:true,data:{id:'1',firstName:'Jorge',lastName:'Ramon',company:'MiamiCoder',title:'Mr',pic:'img/jorger.jpg',email:'ramonj@miamicoder.net',webPage:'http://www.miamicoder.com',imAddress:'',homePhone:'',busPhone:'555 555-5555',mobPhone:'',fax:'',bAddress:'123 Acme Rd #001nMiami, FL 33133',hAddress:'',mailingAddress:'mailToBAddress'}} The success property indicates whether the request has succeeded or not. If the request succeeds, success is accompanied by a data property, which contains the contact's information. Although some fields are automatically populated after a call to load(), the form's title, the contact's picture, and the mailing address radio button require further processing. This can be done in the handler for the actioncomplete event: contactForm.on({ actioncomplete: function(form, action){ if(action.type == 'load'){} }}); As already mentioned, the contact's information arrives in the data property of the action's result: var contact = action.result.data; The default mailing address comes in the contact's mailingAddress property. Hence, the radio button for the default mailing address is set as shown in the following line of code: Ext.getCmp(contact.mailingAddress).setValue(true); The source for the contact's photo is the value of contact.pic: Ext.getDom('pic').src = contact.pic; And finally, the title of the form: contactForm.setTitle(contact.firstName + ' ' + contact.lastName); There's more... Although this recipe's focus is on loading form data, you should also pay attention to the layout techniques used—multiple rows, multiple columns, fieldsets—that allow you to achieve rich and flexible user interfaces for your forms. See Also... The next recipe, Serving the XML data to a form, explains how to use a form to load the XML data sent from the server.

Creating validation functions for URLs, email addresses, and other types of data Ext JS has an extensive library of validation functions. This is how it can be used to validate URLs, email addresses, and other types of data. The following screenshot shows email address validation in action: This screenshot displays URL validation in action: How to do it... Initialize the QuickTips singleton: Ext.QuickTips.init(); Create a form with fields that accept specific data formats: Ext.onReady(function() { var commentForm = new Ext.FormPanel({ frame: true, title: 'Send your comments', bodyStyle: 'padding:5px', width: 550, layout: 'form', defaults: { msgTarget: 'side' }, items: [ { xtype: 'textfield', fieldLabel: 'Name', name: 'name', anchor: '95%', allowBlank: false }, { xtype: 'textfield', fieldLabel: 'Email', name: 'email', anchor: '95%', vtype: 'email' }, { xtype: 'textfield', fieldLabel: 'Web page', name: 'webPage', vtype: 'url', anchor: '95%' }, { xtype: 'textarea', fieldLabel: 'Comments', name: 'comments', anchor: '95%', height: 150, allowBlank: false }], buttons: [{ text: 'Send' }, { text: 'Cancel' }] }); commentForm.render(document.body);}); How it works... The vtype configuration option specifies which validation function will be applied to the field. There's more... Validation types in Ext JS include alphanumeric, numeric, URL, and email formats. You can extend this feature with custom validation functions, and virtually, any format can be validated. For example, the following code shows how you can add a validation type for JPG and PNG files: Ext.apply(Ext.form.VTypes, { Picture: function(v) { return /^.*.(jpg|JPG|png|PNG)$/.test(v); }, PictureText: 'Must be a JPG or PNG file';}); If you need to replace the default error text provided by the validation type, you can do so by using the vtypeText configuration option: { xtype: 'textfield', fieldLabel: 'Web page', name: 'webPage', vtype: 'url', vtypeText: 'I am afraid that you did not enter a URL', anchor: '95%'} See also... The Specifying the required fields in a form recipe, covered earlier in this article, explains how to make some form fields required The Setting the minimum and maximum length allowed for a field's value recipe, covered earlier in this article, explains how to restrict the number of characters entered in a field The Changing the location where validation errors are displayed recipe, covered earlier in this article, shows how to relocate a field's error icon Refer to the previous recipe, Deferring field validation until form submission, to know how to validate all fields at once upon form submission, instead of using the default automatic field validation The next recipe, Confirming passwords and validating dates using relational field validation, explains how to perform validation when the value of one field depends on the value of another field The Rounding up your validation strategy with server-side validation of form fields recipe (covered later in this article) explains how to perform server-side validation Confirming passwords and validating dates using relational field validation Frequently, you face scenarios where the values of two fields need to match, or the value of one field depends on the value of another field. Let's examine how to build a registration form that requires the user to confirm his or her password when signing up. How to do it… Initialize the QuickTips singleton: Ext.QuickTips.init(); Create a custom vtype to handle the relational validation of the password: Ext.apply(Ext.form.VTypes, { password: function(val, field) { if (field.initialPassField) { var pwd = Ext.getCmp(field.initialPassField); return (val == pwd.getValue()); } return true; }, passwordText: 'What are you doing?<br/>The passwords entered do not match!'}); Create the signup form: var signupForm = { xtype: 'form', id: 'register-form', labelWidth: 125, bodyStyle: 'padding:15px;background:transparent', border: false, url: 'signup.php', items: [ { xtype: 'box', autoEl: { tag: 'div', html: '<div class="app-msg"><img src="img/businessman add.png" class="app-img" /> Register for The Magic Forum</div>' } }, { xtype: 'textfield', id: 'email', fieldLabel: 'Email', allowBlank: false, minLength: 3, maxLength: 64,anchor:'90%', vtype:'email' }, { xtype: 'textfield', id: 'pwd', fieldLabel: 'Password', inputType: 'password',allowBlank: false, minLength: 6, maxLength: 32,anchor:'90%', minLengthText: 'Password must be at least 6 characters long.' }, { xtype: 'textfield', id: 'pwd-confirm', fieldLabel: 'Confirm Password', inputType: 'password', allowBlank: false, minLength: 6, maxLength: 32,anchor:'90%', minLengthText: 'Password must be at least 6 characters long.', vtype: 'password', initialPassField: 'pwd' }],buttons: [{ text: 'Register', handler: function() { Ext.getCmp('register-form').getForm().submit(); }},{ text: 'Cancel', handler: function() { win.hide(); } }]} Create the window that will host the signup form: Ext.onReady(function() { win = new Ext.Window({ layout: 'form', width: 340, autoHeight: true, closeAction: 'hide', items: [signupForm] }); win.show();

What do people mean by "sticky"? If you have ever ran a blog or web site before, you may have noticed that it's fairly easy to get a spike in traffic by submitting a good story to a few social bookmarking sites or by being lucky enough to get a link to one of your posts from a much larger site. The problem is that after a day or so, when the submissions fall off the front page, it's likely your traffic will die down to its usual levels again. Some site owners fall into the trap of chasing after the next traffic spike, using "linkbait" articles with intentionally controversial titles and content, when they should really be focusing on quality content, improving the site, and working towards sustained growth. Many bloggers submit their site to StumbleUpon.com. StumbleUpon is a web service where users can enter their interests, and be sent to a random site that will match those interests. Those users can then either give a "thumbs up" to the site they are sent to indicating that they like the site or a "thumbs down" if they don't like it. Those votes are used to improve future suggestions and increase the chances of the next site that they "Stumble Upon" being one that they are interested in. Other popular sites for increasing traffic include Technorati (a site that measures the "authority" of a blog based on how many other bloggers are linking to it), and the news/story-related sites Reddit (a general interest site with everything from politics to gadgets-related news), and Digg (a site with a focus on tech and gaming news). A sticky blog is one that doesn't just attract new visitors, it keeps them. Instead of having a visitor click through from a link on Technorati or visit by using the Stumble! feature of StumbleUpon, skim the page they land on and then leave, a sticky blog would make that visitor stay around a little longer. Ideally, visitors would read the article they were interested in and then find themselves intrigued enough to read more articles. They may comment on some articles and then keep returning to read answers to their comments. Or, they may decide to subscribe to the blog so that they can read future posts. A sticky site encourages readers to become engaged with the community, resulting in long-term increases in traffic. When new readers arrive at the site for the first time, they get involved themselves and keep coming back. They may also tell their friends or link to the site from their own sites, giving you free promotion. Letting readers and authors communicate Interesting content is vital, but one of the best ways to get people coming back to your blog network is to give them a chance to interact with the site's authors and with each other. This not only makes the readers feel valued, it also opens up a dialogue that encourages repeat visitors. Contact forms Providing visitors with a way to contact you privately is useful for several reasons. The visitor may want to discuss advertising opportunities, submit some news you may be interested in, or ask for help with a problem they have accessing part of the site. You could post your email address on the site, but this makes you vulnerable to spam attacks. A contact form is a safer way to allow your visitors to contact you. Time for action – setting up contact forms Let's set up a contact form: Download Contact Form 7 from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/. To install, upload the contents of the archive file to /wp-content/plugins. Activate the plugin and go to the settings page (Tools | Contact Form 7). You can also access the page by clicking Settings under the plugin name, which appears on the Manage Plugins page. You can add new fields using the Generate Tag drop-down menu. Further down the admin page you will see options to set error messages (such as the message users will see if they miss out a required field, or if they try to upload a file that is too big). Once you have created the form, make a note of the tag at the top of the screen (in our case this was [contact-form 1 "Contact form 1"] ). Create a new page (Pages | Add New) called Contact Us, add a short message to the page, and then paste the contact form tag into the page. Depending on the theme you are using, you may need to add the Pages widget to your sidebar so that visitors can find the new page. Your page should look something like this: What just happened? Contact Form 7 is a powerful contact form tool that supports CAPTCHAs (via the Really Simple CAPTCHA  plugin), file uploads, drop-down menus, and more. You can define multiple contact forms and have each one submit to a different email address. This could be useful if you wish to have different people contacted for, say, advertising queries, news submissions, and tech support. You can also have a contact form submit to multiple email addresses. So, as well as having the relevant person receive a copy of each message, the site administrator could ensure they receive a copy of all messages too. You can set a prefix for each message, in addition to the subject line the visitor sets. For example, if you set the prefix to [Slayer-Form1], all emails from that contact form will have a subject line that begins with that text. You can use this to set up filters in your email application, making it easy to prioritize emails from different contact forms. Improved comments The basic WordPress MU comment feature allows readers to post their thoughts about a blog post, but it is not very good for encouraging discussion. One useful service for bloggers is IntenseDebate. This service allows for threaded discussion in comments, subscription to comments by RSS and email, and the ability to tie blog commenting in with other social networking sites and follow comments made by other blog readers. Time for action – IntenseDebate Comments Download the IntenseDebate Comments plugin from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/intensedebate/. You will need to sign up for an account at http://intensedebate.com/. Activate the plugin. Go to Settings | IntenseDebate. You will be presented with a login screen. Enter the account details for the account you created in step 2. Once you have logged in, click Start Importing Comments. The import process can take a very long time, even if you don't have many comments to import. Once the import process is complete, you can tweak the settings to suit your blog—although I found the default ones were a good starting point. The IntenseDebate Comments plugin has its own Comments caption, so you may want to remove the Comments header from the index.php file in your theme folder. The new comment box should look something like this: You can moderate comments using the already familiar WordPress MU interface or the dashboard on the IntenseDebate site. What just happened? IntenseDebate is a commenting system that sits on top of WordPress and WordPress MU. It is ideal for all blogs, whether they are part of a blog network, or a standalone blog. It does not replace the existing WordPress comment system; it only complements it. This means you can use IntenseDebate in conjunction with other plugins that rely on the WordPress MU comment system. Readers can comment on your blog using the IntenseDebate comment system. If they have JavaScript turned off, they will be presented with the normal WordPress comment system instead. IntenseDebate has lots of useful features that will make your users feel a greater sense of engagement with your site's authors. Those features are described below: Threaded discussions: IntenseDebate supports threaded comments. This makes it easy for readers to follow the discussions going on in the comments section. Readers can reply to the blog post itself, or reply to a specific comment, and IntenseDebate will break related comments into threads so that the discussion is easy to keep track of. Track comments or comment anonymously: Readers can comment anonymously, or, if they have an IntenseDebate profile they can log in to it and comment using it. Any comments made will be stored in the WordPress comments database and also be sent to IntenseDebate. Subscribe to comments: Readers can subscribe to comments on a particular post by email or through their favorite RSS reader. If they have an IntenseDebate account, they also have the option to send a Twitter message or "Tweet" to alert their friends that they have commented on a particular post. Reputation and voting: Another useful feature is the reputation system. Visitors can vote on comments, and comments that get a lot of negative votes will be hidden from view unless a user requests to see them. This is a handy form of "self moderation" for the community. The reputation system applies to only logged in users and gives each user an overall rating based on the quality of their comments on sites all over the Internet. Activating IntenseDebate on your users' blogs One important thing to remember is that even if you set IntenseDebate to automatically activate for your users, it won't do anything unless they set it up. Your users will still have the original WordPress MU comment system. They will be alerted to the fact that the plugin is not working for them by a message that will appear at the top of every page in their admin panel. Have a go hero – tweaking IntenseDebate IntenseDebate has so many features that there is not enough room to cover them all here. Take a look at the Extras (http://intensedebate.com/extras) page for some widgets that you may want to add to your blog. Also, check the Settings page for your blog in IntenseDebate. You can edit the moderation settings on that page. The default settings include a list of spam words that will cause comments to be flagged for moderation. Comments will also be flagged for moderation if they contain more than two URLs. You can tweak the commenting system's settings to filter by IP address, email address, key words, and profanity. You can also alter how the comments are displayed, the text displayed when people report comments, the layout, and the location of the blog's RSS feed. You may want to change that to use the FeedBurner version of the RSS feed. >> continue Reading: Sticky Features for your Blog Network with WordPress MU 2.8: Part 2

What is the siteaccess system? To override eZ Publish's default configuration, we need to create a collection of configuration settings called siteaccess. The role of a siteaccess is to indicate to eZ which database, design, and var directory should be used for a particular context. With siteaccess it is possible to use the same content and different designs (for example, when creating a mobile version of our site) or do the opposite (for example, managing a multilingual site where the template doesn't change but the content does). It's also possible to create an administration siteaccess, where we can manage any kind of content, such as users, media files and, of course, the articles, or a frontend siteaccess that is the website, where we can only view the public published content. A typical eZ publish site consists of two siteaccesses: a public interface for visitors and a restricted interface for editors. In this case, both siteaccesses use the same content, but different designs. Whereas the administration siteaccess would most likely use the built-in administration design, the public siteaccess would probably use a custom design. The following illustration, taken from the official eZ Publish documentation, shows this scenario: Usually, in big projects it is also useful to have two additional siteaccesses: a staging siteaccess and a developing siteaccess. The first is used in a staging environment to make frequent deployments of modifications that can be tested by the customer (in this case, the siteaccess uses a different database but the same design as for the public and admin siteaccesses). The second one, instead, is used by developers on their local machine (this siteaccess uses a local database, but once again uses the same design as for the public and admin siteaccesses). A single eZ publish installation can host a virtually unlimited number of sites by simply adding new siteaccesses, designs, and databases. Siteaccess folder structure The configuration settings for siteaccesses are located inside a dedicated subfolder within the /settings/siteaccess folder. The name of the subfolder is the actual name of the siteaccess. It is very important to remember that a siteaccess name can only contain letters, numbers, and underscores. The following illustration shows a setup with two siteaccesses: admin and public. When a siteaccess is in use, eZ publish reads the configuration file in the following sequence: Default configuration settings: /settings/*.ini Siteaccess settings: /settings/siteaccess/[name_of_siteaccess]/*.ini.append.php Global overrides: /settings/override/*.ini.append.php eZ Publish will first read the default configuration settings. Then, it will determine which siteaccess to use based on the rules that are defined in the global override for site.ini /settings/override/site.ini.append.php. When it knows which siteaccess has to be used, it will go into the correct siteaccess folder and read the configuration files that belong to that siteaccess. The settings of the siteaccess will override the default configuration settings. For example, if a siteaccess uses a database called packtmediaproject_test, the system will find this and automatically use the specified database when an incoming request is processed. Finally, eZ Publish reads the configuration files in the global override directory. The settings in the global override directory will override all other settings. So, if a database called packtmediaproject is specified in the global override directory for site.ini, then eZ publish will attempt to use that database regardless of what is specified in the siteaccess settings. If a setting is not overridden either by the siteaccess, or from within a global override, then the default setting will be used. The default settings are set by the .ini files located in the /settings directory. The following figure illustrates how the system reads the configuration files, using the site.ini file as an example:                                                                                             Creating a siteaccess for dev, staging, and production environments Once we have finished installing eZ Publish, we'll find a folder called setting/siteaccess, with the default siteaccess automatically configured. In our case we'll find these folders: admin: This folder usually isn't used as siteaccess, but it contains a standard configuration file that can be used to set up the administration panel setup: This folder contains all of the configuration files that are used during the installation process ezwebin_site: This is where the main design is imported directly from the eZ.no site for the package eZ Webin ita, eng, fre: Last but not least, the ita, eng, and fre folders have the configuration files used by the site to enable internationalization and localization The ezwebin_site_admin is created by the webmin site package, and contains all of the configuration files for the administration panel. Enterprise siteaccess schema In an enterprise development process, it is very important to have four more siteaccesses: dev dev_panel staging staging_panel The siteaccesses dev and dev_panel will be used as a development playground installation, which can be used by the development team members, with their own configuration parameters, such as database connection, path, and debug file. This will help them to test different configuration parameters or extensions without impacting the production site. The siteaccesses staging and staging_panel will be used as a staging arena that can be used by a customer to evaluate new functionality before it is released to production. Usually, the staging installation is installed on a clone of the production server, to make sure that everything works in the same way. In our case, we will work on the same server to better understand how to create the different siteaccesses. All siteacccesses will have some configuration files in common, and sometimes these have to assign the same value to the parameters specified inside them. For example, if you need to create a new language siteacccess, you'll need to copy the same module configuration files to be sure that they will work in the same way for all of the languages. In this case, it will be useful to create a symbolic link from one siteaccess to another. If you don't know what a Linux symbolic link is, you can think of it as a virtual pointer to a real file, like a Windows XP shortcut.

Using video files Video files are generally large due to the amount of content they contain and their length. It's beyond the scope of our article to describe them in detail, but in basic terms, they are a linear sequence of still images placed together to create a sequence of movement, usually accompanied by an audio track. Original video files are compressed using a codec to produce a compressed video file. The various codecs produce different results for file size, quality, and export. Video files play in the browser by downloading the data through the Internet, progressively streaming it so the movie begins to play before the whole file has downloaded. Audio files work in a similar way, but are often not as large. The final quality of a video also depends on the method used to capture it and how it's stored. The better the quality of the camera, the better the result. If you want to learn more about video, Wikipedia has a page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_formats. Just like anything else, there are pros and cons of adding videos to your website. YouTube alone has proven there is a strong market for a more visual medium. However, there are still many people who prefer text-based content as well. Consider whether adding a video to your site will enhance your user's experience. Is the material promotional or instructional? Is the content better demonstrated than explained? Video material can broaden your target audience. Many people prefer watching a video online to reading lengthy bodies of text. Videos aren't that great for search engine optimization. Consider adding a transcript to the page as well, in order to increase the ability to search. Choosing the best video file format Video played through the Internet requires a media player, which acts as an interface between the video file and the browser. These days most Internet users have one embedded within their browser. Popular versions include: QuickTime, a player created by Apple Windows Media Player WINAMP Real Player, developed by Real Networks Adobe Flash Player The following are some of the video file types that can be played through your website using third-party media players: .wmv files are a popular format developed by Microsoft and which come bundled within the Internet Explorer software package and are, therefore, preinstalled on Windows PCs. This is a format good for movies with movement within them. This format works with Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, and another called VLC Player. This format isn't very compatible with Mac or Linux computer users. .mov files are a QuickTime video platform extension that also plays back on the Windows operating system. The Apple QuickTime movie player software can be easily downloaded from Apple at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/. While not many browsers have the QuickTime media player installed, this format does provide very high quality video. You can always provide a link to the URL to download the software in order to play the video. .avi files are often the format of videos with smaller dimensions, played back through a website. They are a container for audio and video files (hence the name!). They can sometimes be quite large in file size, depending on the codec used to compress the video footage. They are a mainstream format. .swf and .flv videos are excellent for web video streaming and can also include interactive features. Most Mac and PCs have the Flash Shockwave Player installed; however, it can be downloaded from http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/. Take note of the requirements for your individual operating system and browser preferences. Keep the following in mind when considering a video for your website: Ensure the video is succinct and the file size as small as possible. Even with a high speed download, time is still required to fully download the complete file. Keeping the video between one to three minutes long and the file size under five megabytes The more the movement in a video, the larger the file size. Consider whether the video really enhances the message. Viewers are only interested in material that is useful to them and will resent consuming their download resources on a video that holds no value for them. The larger the file size, the longer it takes to upload. Consider your audience's data rate. Do they have high speed downloads or are there some with dial-up connections? Video files are generally large due to the amount of content they contain. They stream (streaming is the way the Internet transfers multimedia information) through the data so the video will begin playing before it has fully downloaded itself into the browser, allowing it to be played back as quickly as possible. Audio files work in a similar way, but are not usually big files. There are various video file formats available and most website users have a player to see them already contained within the browser. Many users have QuickTime, a player created by Apple (that also runs on PCs) and Real Player, developed by Real Networks. Videos require a special plugin to play them through an article on your site, once you have uploaded it. Alternatively, you can embed a link from the popular YouTube site (http://www.youtube.com/). We'll look at how to do both in relation to the Party People website. Uploading a video We'll upload a new video, much the same way we would upload an image, to a new subfolder called videos within the Party People website. The steps are as follows: Navigate to the Media Manager. Select the stories folder and type videos into the Files input box. Click Create Folder. Select the new videos folder icon; then click the Browse button to choose the video from our desktop computer. Click Start Upload. Now we have a video file ready to be inserted into an article. The Party People website has the popular AllVideos plugin installed to do this. Updating videos—AllVideos plugin This is another neat plugin that works in much the same way as the Simple Image Gallery, a stablemate from this team of developers. If you don't have it installed and you would like to present videos on your site, ask your developer to install it for you or refer to the developers website http://www.joomlaworks.gr/content/view/35/41/ for instructions. Our Party People website has a .mov video on the Products and Services page, which we will update. To update the video display: Navigate to the Article Manager through the top menu and open theOur Services Include... article. Change the name of the video file between the { } and {/} tags within the text editor to the new filename. Depending on the format of the video being presented, the code should look like this: {mov}promoVideo{/mov} This code displays a QuickTime movie within the article. Save the changes. The following screenshot shows us how the video will look in context. Note that you do not need to include the format extension at the end of the filename, as the tag surrounding the name addresses this. Changing to a different video file and format The AllVideos plugin supports a number of video file formats and the developer's website lists them all at http://www.joomlaworks.gr/content/view/35/41/. We'll change the video we just linked to a different one which is in the .wmv format. The steps are as follows: Navigate to the Article containing the video presentation. Change the tag between the { } braces to reflect the new file type, taking care not to delete any of the symbols. For example: {wmv}updatedServicesVideo{/wmv} Save the changes to your article. You should take care to avoid rearranging any of the formatting within the code, as this will prevent the movie from playing. That is, don't add any extra spaces, colons, commas, and so on.  

Additional actions In the following section, you will be performing additional configuration that is optional but will greatly improve performance and usability in the context of the development work you are about to start. Setting memory limits Review the memory settings. This value is dependent on your machine resources and may need to be adjusted for your machine. Allocating less memory for startup will give you better performance on a machine with less memory available. This value is appropriate for a 3 GB memory machine or less. Edit the SOA domain environment file found here (make sure you have the SOA Domain environment file): C:OracleMiddlewarehome_11gR1user_projectsdomains domain1binsetSOADomainEnv.cmd Set memory values: set DEFAULT_MEM_ARGS=-Xms512m -Xmx512m Starting and stopping Now it's time to start your servers. You can start them using the provided script or you can start them separately. Instructions for both methods are included. Starting First set boot.properties and then start the servers. Before you start, set the boot properties so you are not prompted to log in during server startup. Copy C:pobinboot.properties to C:OracleMiddlewarehome_11gR1user_projectsdomainsdomain1. Edit the copied file to reflect the password for your configuration (entered during domain configuration). The first time the server is started this file is encrypted and copied to the server locations.You can start the servers one at a time or you can use the start_all script to start the admin and SOA managed servers (not BAM). To start them one at a time instead, skip to step 6. Copy the startup script to the Oracle directory: C:pobinstart_all.cmd toC:OracleMiddleware Edit the copied file to reflect your environment. Open a command window and start your servers as shown. You must specify how many seconds to wait after starting the admin server before starting the managed server. The admin server must be in the RUNNING state before the managed server starts (see the following screenshot). Try 180 seconds and adjust as necessary. You will need more time the first time you start after a machine reboot than for subsequent restarts: cd C:OracleMiddlewarestart_all.cmd 180 Your servers are now starting automatically so you can skip steps 6-10. Jump to step 12 to continue. To start the servers manually, continue with the following steps. Open three command windows, one for the WebLogic admin server, one for the SOA managed server, and one for the BAM managed server (only start BAM when you need it for a BAM lab). Start the Admin Server first: cd C:OracleMiddlewarehome_11gR1user_projectsdomainsdomain1startWebLogic.cmd Wait for the Admin Server to finish starting up. It takes a few minutes—watch for status RUNNING in the log console window: Start the SOA managed server in the second command window. This start script is in the bin directory. You can also run it directly from the bin directory: cd C:OracleMiddlewarehome_11gR1user_projectsdomainsdomain1binstartManagedWebLogic.cmd soa_server1 When prompted, enter the username weblogic and password welcome1. If you did step 1 and set boot.properties, you will not be prompted. The server is started when you see the message, INFO: FabricProviderServlet.stateChanged SOA Platform is running and accepting requests. Start the BAM managed server in the third command window—do this only when needed for the BAM lab: cd C:OracleMiddlewarehome_11gR1user_projectsdomainsdomain1binstartManagedWebLogic.cmd bam_server1 When prompted, enter the user name weblogic and password welcome1. If you did step 1 and set boot.properties, you will not be prompted. Watch for the RUNNING status. Console URLs Log in with weblogic/welcome1 for all consoles: Weblogic console: http://localhost:7001/console Enterprise Manager console: http://localhost:7001/em SOA worklist: http://localhost:8001/integration/worklistapp B2B console: http://localhost:8001/b2b BAM (must use IE browser): http://localhost:9001/OracleBAM Stopping servers Whenever you need to stop the servers complete the following: Stop the managed servers first by entering Ctrl+C in the command window. Wait until stopped. Stop the admin server by entering Ctrl+C in the command window. WebLogic Server console settings There are two suggested changes to make in the WebLogic Server console. First, you will be viewing application deployments often using the WebLogic server console. This is a lot more convenient if you change the settings not to show libraries as this makes the list a lot shorter and you can find what you need more quickly. Start the WebLogic Admin Server (WLS) if it is not already running. Log in to the WLS console http://localhost:7001/console. Click on Deployments in the left navigation bar. Click on Customize this table at the top of the Deployments table. Change the number of rows per page to 100 (there are only about 30). Select the checkbox to exclude libraries and click on Apply. Second, when the server is started, internal applications like the WLS console are not deployed completely and you see a slight delay when you first access the console. You saw this delay just now when you first accessed the console URL. You can change this behavior to deploy internal applications at startup instead and then you don't get the delay when you access the console. This is convenient for demos (if you want to show the console) and also if you tend to use the console each time you start up the server. Click on domain1 in the left navigation bar in the WLS console. Click on Configuration | General tab. Deselect Enable on-demand deployment of internal applications checkbox. Click on the Save button. EM settings for development The Enterprise Manager can provide different levels of information about composite runtime instances based on a property setting. During development, it is helpful to have a higher setting. These settings are not used on production machines except when specifically needed for debugging purposes as there is a performance cost. Start your servers if they are not already running. Log in to the EM console at http://localhost:7001/em. Right-click on the soa-infra (soa_server1) in the left navigation bar to open the SOA menu and select SOA Administration | Common Properties. Select Audit Level: Development and select the checkbox for Capture Composite Instance State. Click on Apply and click on Yes. If you need to uninstall JDeveloper and servers If you need to uninstall everything, complete the following: First save anything from C:OracleMiddlewarejdev_11gR1jdevelopermywork that you want to keep as this directory will be deleted. Run Uninstall from the program menu to completion for both JDeveloper and WLS. Delete C:OracleMiddlewarejdev_11gR1 and C:OracleMiddlewarehome_11gR1. If you get an error message about not being able to delete because a name or path is too long, change the names of the composite directories within home_ 11gR1user_projectsdomainsdomain1deployed-composites to abcd and try deleting again. Delete program groups from C:Documents and SettingsAll UsersStart MenuPrograms: Oracle Fusion Middleware 11.1.1.1.0 Oracle SOA 11g - Home1 Oracle WebLogic Complete the Dropping existing schema section earlier in this article to clean up the database.

There are many reasons why you would want to display a calendar. You can use it to display upcoming events, to keep a diary, or to show a timetable. Recently, for example, I combined a calendar with an online store for a client to book meetings and receive payments more intuitively. Google calendar is probably what springs to mind when people think of calendars online. There is a very good plugin called jquery-week-calendar that shows a week with events in a fashion similar to Google's calendar. Its homepage is at http://www.redredred.com.au/projects/jquery-week-calendar/. To get the latest copy of the plugin, go to http://code.google.com/p/jquery-week-calendar/downloads/list and get the highest-numbered file. The examples in this article are done with version 1.2.0. Download the library and extract it so that there is a directory named jquery-weekcalendar-1.2.0 in the root of your demo directory. Displaying the calendar As usual, the HTML for the simplest configuration is very simple. Save this as calendar.html: <html> <head> <script src="../jquery.min.js"></script> <script src="../jquery-ui.min.js"></script> <script src="../jquery-weekcalendar-1.2.0/jquery.weekcalendar.js"> </script> <script src="calendar.js"></script> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../jquery-ui.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../jquery-weekcalendar-1.2.0/jquery.weekcalendar.css"/> </head> <body> <div id="calendar_wrapper" style="height:500px"></div> </body> </html> We will keep all of our JavaScript in an external file called calendar.js, which will initially contain just this: $(document).ready(function() { $('#calendar_wrapper').weekCalendar({ 'height':function($calendar){ return $('#calendar_wrapper')[0].offsetHeight; } }); }); This is fairly straightforward. The script will apply the widget to the #calendar_wrapper element, and the widget's height will be set to that of the wrapper element. Even with this tiny bit of code, we already have a good-looking calendar, and when you drag your mouse cursor around it, you'll see that events are created as you lift the mouse up: It looks good, but it doesn't do anything yet. The events are temporary, and will vanish as soon as you change the week or reload the page. In order to make them permanent, we need to send details of the events to the server and save them there. Creating an event What we need to do is to have the client save the event on the server when it is created. In this article, we'll use PHP sessions to save the data for the sake of simplicity. Sessions are chunks of data, which are kept on the server side and are related to the cookie or PHPSESSID parameter that the client uses to access that session. We will use sessions in these examples because they do not need as much setup as databases. For your own projects, you should adapt the PHP side in order to connect to a database instead. If you are using this article to create a full application, you will obviously want to use something more permanent than sessions, in which case the PHP code should be adapted such that all references to sessions are replaced with database references instead. This is beyond the scope of this book, but as you are a PHP developer, you probably do this everyday anyway! When the event has been created, we want a modal dialog to appear and ask for more details. In this test case, we'll add a text area for further details, which allows for more data than would appear in the small visible area in the calendar itself. A modal dialog is a "pop up" that appears and blocks all other actions on the page until it has been taken care of. It's useful in cases where the answer to a question must be known before a script can carry on with its work. Now, let's create an event and add it to our calendar. Client-side code In the calendar.js file, add an eventNew event to the weekCalendar call: $(document).ready(function() { $('#calendar_wrapper').weekCalendar({ 'height':function($calendar){ return $('#calendar_wrapper')[0].offsetHeight; }, 'eventNew':function(calEvent, $event) { calendar_new_entry(calEvent,$event); } }); }); When an event is created, the calendar_new_entry function will be called with details of the new event in the calEvent parameter. Now, add the function calendar_new_entry: function calendar_new_entry(calEvent,$event){ var ds=calEvent.start, df=calEvent.end; $('<div id="calendar_new_entry_form" title="New Calendar Entry"> event name<br /> <input value="new event" id="calendar_new_entry_form_title" /> <br /> body text<br /> <textarea style="width:400px;height:200px" id="calendar_new_entry_form_body">event description </textarea> </div>').appendTo($('body')); $("#calendar_new_entry_form").dialog({ bgiframe: true, autoOpen: false, height: 440, width: 450, modal: true, buttons: { 'Save': function() { var $this=$(this); $.getJSON('./calendar.php?action=save&id=0&start=' +ds.getTime()/1000+'&end='+df.getTime()/1000, { 'body':$('#calendar_new_entry_form_body').val(), 'title':$('#calendar_new_entry_form_title').val() }, function(ret){ $this.dialog('close'); $('#calendar_wrapper').weekCalendar('refresh'); $("#calendar_new_entry_form").remove(); } ); }, Cancel: function() { $event.remove(); $(this).dialog('close'); $("#calendar_new_entry_form").remove(); } }, close: function() { $('#calendar').weekCalendar('removeUnsavedEvents'); $("#calendar_new_entry_form").remove(); } }); $("#calendar_new_entry_form").dialog('open'); } What's happening here is that a form is created and added to the body (the second line of the function), then the third line of the function creates a modal window from that form and adds some buttons to it. Our modal dialog should look like this: The Save button, when pressed, calls the server-side file calendar.php with the parameters needed to save the event, including the start and end, and the title and body. When the result returns, the calendar is refreshed with the new event's data included. When any of the buttons are clicked, we close the dialog and remove it from the page completely. Note how we are sending time information to the server (shown highlighted in the code we just saw). JavaScript time functions usually measure in milliseconds, but we want to send it to PHP, which generally measures time in seconds. So, we convert the value on the client so that the PHP can use the received data as it is, without needing to do anything to it. Every little helps! Server-side code On the server side, we want to take the new event and save it. Remember that we're doing it in sessions in this example, but you should feel free to adapt this to any other model that you wish. Create a file called calendar.php and save it with this source in it: <?php session_start(); if(!isset($_SESSION['calendar'])){ $_SESSION['calendar']=array( 'ids'=>0, ); } if(isset($_REQUEST['action'])){ switch($_REQUEST['action']){ case 'save': // { $start_date=(int)$_REQUEST['start']; $data=array( 'title'=>(isset($_REQUEST['title'])?$_REQUEST['title']:''), 'body' =>(isset($_REQUEST['body'])?$_REQUEST['body']:''), 'start'=>date('c',$start_date), 'end' =>date('c',(int)$_REQUEST['end']) ); $id=(int)$_REQUEST['id']; if($id && isset($_SESSION['calendar'][$id])){ $_SESSION['calendar'][$id]=$data; } else{ $id= ++$_SESSION['calendar']['ids']; $_SESSION['calendar'][$id]=$data; } echo 1; exit; // } } } ?> In the server-side code of this project, all the requested actions are handled by a switch statement. This is done for demonstration purposes—whenever we add a new action, we simply add a new switch case. If you are using this for your own purposes, you may wish to rewrite it using functions instead of large switch cases. The date function is used to convert the start and end parameters into ISO 8601 date format. That's the format jquery-week-calendar prefers, so we'll try to keep everything in that format. Visually, nothing appears to happen, but the data is actually being saved. To see what's being saved, create a new file named test.php, and use the var_dump function in it to examine the session data (view it in your browser): <?php session_start(); var_dump($_SESSION); ?> Here's an example from my test machine: