Blog
Posted by Gitte Vermeiren on Jun 18, 2009
Next to development on EMC Documentum, we are now also taking on projects that provide document management solutions on SharePoint Server. SharePoint gives you basically the similar set of functionalities like storing documents together with metadata, and also provides a versioning and workflow management framework.
Off course we would like to reuse our existing efforts done in Ruby on EMC Documentum on other systems as well, so also on SharePoint Server. For this we can not use standard Ruby as we would like. Instead we started looking at IronRuby, the Ruby implementation on the .Net Framework, since all SharePoint development is based on .Net. (Yes, we know, there are also quite a lot of Web services we can utilize, but let's leave those out of the question for now).
To get a view of the possibilities we did an extensive test of IronRuby's possibilities on some SharePoint sites and we can now say these tests were quite successfull. The full story of how we accomplished this and how you yourself can try out some dynamic coding on SharePoint Server, can be found in our labs section.
Posted by Stijn Pint on May 20, 2009
For one of our Rails projects, I needed a simple solution to run some background tasks on demand of the user (various calculations or data imports which can take several minutes to complete).
There are several solutions out there, like Starling, Workling, backgrounDRB ,... but I really wanted something without too much complexity. Another catch: our project is running on a Windows production server… yeah, I know…
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Posted by Stijn Van Vreckem on May 05, 2009
We got some questions about the use of Documentum 6.5 and Ruby with ActiveDCTM.
My article at EMC Developer site explains the use of Ruby on Documentum 5.3.
One of our clients is moving to Documentum 6.5 so we are now testing ActiveDCTM on a CENTOS Linux Oracle environment with Documentum 6.5 sp1.
In Documentum 6 the C/C++ DMCL API has been replaced with the Java‑based DFC API.
These core changes, while extremely significant, are largely transparent to the DFC user.
C/C++ applications (like DCTMRuby and ActiveDCTM) that interact directly with the DMCL continue to work as a copy of DMCL continues to be provided.
New Documentum 6 features are not available through DMCL, however.
Here is a simple example on how to create a document from the IRB customized command line.
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Posted by Gitte Vermeiren on Feb 26, 2009
Using dynamic languages, like Ruby, in conversion with static language frameworks, like .Net, is one of the hot topics in town. No wonder .Net developers are putting a lot of effort in the development of the DLR, the Dynamic Language Runtime, which will run on top of their CLR, the Common Language Runtime. This will give us the capability to enrich the vast framework capabilities of .Net with the dynamic features provided by Ruby.
At XAOP we recently did tests with both the DLR and IronRuby (an Open Source implementation of the Ruby programming language for .NET), to get both Ruby and .Net united in a single application. This gives us tons of new possibilities, since the .Net class library is already so extensive for creating both Windows based and Web based applications (just to name a few).
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Posted by Tim Brys on Feb 06, 2009
If you have ever used god, you know it's a wonderful application to monitor your processes and to keep them going.
The sole inconvenience of god is the way it's controlled while running. You often have to log in to your server and write some commands on the command line to simply restart a task or check the logs. "User friendly" isn't the first thing that comes to mind. We can do better.
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Posted by Peter Vanbroekhoven on Jan 23, 2009
Just like last year, the Belgian Ruby User Group is organizing a Ruby and Rails developer’s room at Fosdem 2009 on Sunday 8 February. Fosdem, or the Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting, is a non-commercial event organized by the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community, for this community, and is devoted to bringing developers together and inspire the synergy that binds them. Fosdem has been attended in the past years by around 2000 FOSS enthusiasts and this year they can choose from a whopping 263 talks. And to top it off, Fosdem is absolutely free.
This year we have ten presentations scheduled for our devroom compared to last year’s four, and we are very excited about the program. The rooms are still too small and this year we were asked explicitly not to let the room become overcrowded. This blog post features a photo of last year’s Ruby and Rails devroom, but we still had lots of people turning back because they were simply unable to enter the room. Good news is that we have a room with a capacity of 74 seats compared to 48 last year, but you had better make sure you get a seat in time!
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Posted by Julien France on Dec 23, 2008
Rexcel is a rails plugin made to create custom and stylish excel files from your applications.
It is inspired by Brian P. Hogan's excel plugin that provides a quick an easy way to export your object collections to an excel workbook.
It worked fine but it didn't have enough functionality for my taste. I was using it in a project when I asked myself: “Ok, but what if I want to merge or collapse some excel cells? What if I want to put some text in color, add a border, change the font-size...?”. This excel plugin just exports your data to an excel sheet in a very basic format. I then decided to make a more advanced plugin that will support most of your requirements in terms of formatting.
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Posted by Stijn Van Vreckem on Oct 22, 2008
Today we published a quickstart video of Streamtails (our web 2.0 proxy server project).
In 4 minutes, we walk through the major features of Streamtails: the topics include how to annotate a section of a webpage via tails and how to track your conversations with rss feeds.
Wath the video
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Posted by Stijn Van Vreckem on Oct 16, 2008
Today, I published my article on the Ruby ActiveDCTM gem on the EMC Developer Network site.
My article was originally the outline of a demo that I presented last week at a client.
During that demo I used a customized web based irb shell (like the hands-on tutorial Try Ruby)
to explain a few Documentum server concepts through Ruby.
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Posted by Peter Vanbroekhoven on Oct 10, 2008
Belgium is known all over the world for its beer, its chocolate and its rain. You gotta love the beer and the chocolate, but the rain just plain sucks. Looks like we are heading for a wet autumn though, and that's why, for one week in November, we of XaoP are fleeing off to Orlando in sunny Florida.
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Posted by Stijn Van Vreckem on Sep 23, 2008
Last year EMC acquired X-Hive an XML-based solutions company.
Today I attended the Documentum 6.5 Briefing at the San Marco Village in Schelle BELGIUM where EMC unveiled their future products.
The 6.5 release is important to XAOP because it will target some extra XML services on the Documentum platform.
XAOP is doing Documentum system integration projects with Ruby and Java. With the integration of X-Hive XML database in Documentum 6.5, I believe that it is time to update our XML Docpublisher project.
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Posted by Stijn Pint on Jun 17, 2008
In this short tutorial I’ll describe an easy way to make your Rails application even more enterprise-ready ;-)
For our latest project, our customer asked to change the authentication module, they wanted to be able to use their Active Directory credentials to enter the application.
So, we have an existing rails application :
What do we need :
- User should be able to keep using the old login system (at least temporarily, until all users are ‘upgraded’)
- User should be able to login with his LDAP credentitals
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Posted by Stijn Pint on Jul 07, 2008
Last week, while I was writing the following expression for like the 1000th time, it struck me…
name = Product.find_by_code('code') ? Product.find_by_code('code').name : nil
WTH am I doing writing this crazy, long, duplication bloated one-liner in ruby ? YES, in RUBY ! That ’s just plain WRONG!
There just HAS to be some great, DRYer, magic, aaaah’s and oooooh’s generating, no-longer-than-5-characters expression that handles this!
So instead of bashing my laptop against the wall I IM’d my colleague and local ruby-guru Peter.
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Posted by Stijn Pint on Aug 20, 2008
You all probably know the Rails helper function ‘cycle’, most commonly used to specify alternating classes when iterating over a collection :
<% for item in @items %>
<tr class=<%=cycle('even', 'odd')%>>
<td><%= item.name %></td>
</tr>
<% end %>
Well, apparently it is even more usefull than I thought,
and it was simply a matter of reading the rails documentation ...
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Posted by Peter Vanbroekhoven on Apr 21, 2008
At XaoP, we have recently started checking out Amazon’s EC2. Although
the use of virtualization technology is hardly new in hosting
technologies, Amazon’s take on it offers extra flexibility for
developers to exploit.
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Posted by Tim Brys on Apr 01, 2008
Some time ago, we pointed out a serious memory problem when using libxml-ruby. We found a solution, but recently Ben Lam told us about another way to solve this. Details inside.
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Posted by Stijn Van Vreckem on Mar 30, 2008
I don't know about you, but I had a pretty inspiring weekend.
First of all, I checked out the two significant new features of EC2 - Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones - which help you to run reliable web sites and other applications within Amazon EC2.
Then I watched the IPhone SDK for Web developers video.
I started to test the ReviewNG DRP application via Safari on the IPhone Simulator.
The application works pretty well on the IPhone, but it would be even better if it could work in full screen.
Unfortunately, the full screen mode is not working in my release of the simulator.
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Posted by Stijn Pint on Feb 18, 2008
SVN is great, or maybe I have to say, version control is great.
It makes sure your code doesn’t get lost, keeps track of all the changes, makes collaboration easy, allows for efficient project management (linking changesets to tickets) and so on.
But for all these advantages to be really usefull, you should constantly commit your changes to the repository: bug/ticket closed => commit, feature implemented => commit, plugin/library updated => commit, ...
Problem: you probably don’t have constant access to your SVN repository. You might be on the bus, SVN is blocked by your client’s firewall,...
In comes GIT, and more specific, GIT-SVN.
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