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Authentication with OAuth in Ruby on Rails

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:04:00 GMT

1) Why Using OAuth:

Have you ever built an application that needed access to user data from a third-party application like Google Apps, Twitter, Facebook, …? In the following post we will examine how to do this with Oauth and Google Apps

Hello SAP, It's Ruby Calling

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:07:00 GMT

In one of our projects we need communication between a custom Ruby on Rails application and an SAP system.
In short: the Rails application is analyzing data from different sources, doing some calculations with it and the results should be sent to SAP.
The way we do this now is by writing csv files to a specific location on a fileserver, in SAP there is job that polls this directory every 15 minutes.

As a first step, and to test a real SAP-Ruby interface, we would like to send an event to SAP when the csv files are in place, so that we can eliminate the polling job.

Integrating SharePoint and Documentum through MirrorNG

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:01:00 GMT

The demand for migrations to Microsoft SharePoint continues to grow, as the platform rapidly becomes the standard for organizations seeking a centralized knowledge repository and collaborative workspace.

I'm happy to announce that we've integrated SharePoint in MirrorNG (the content integration product for XAOP). We will offer support for Microsoft SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 in the coming months. We are also looking at integration with CMIS.
I'm excited about the options SharePoint and CMIS will give us architecturally speaking.

Screenshot of our SharePoint MirrorNG test environment.

Whether it will be

migrating between SharePoint sites and Documentum repositories,
upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to 2010,
reorganizing your SharePoint content,
archiving from SharePoint sites to EMC Documentum repositories,
synchronization of content, metadata and security between Documentum and SharePoint.

SOAP and NTLM: now available in red too!

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:54:00 GMT

As more and more of our clients start using SharePoint, we have been investigating how to connect to a SharePoint server using Ruby. SharePoint has a full-fledged set of SOAP services that we can address from Ruby. The SOAP client library bundled with Ruby, called soap4r (also available separately), didn't work for us on SharePoint.

First off, SharePoint usually requires NTLM authentication and soap4r does not support it. Also, soap4r has problems with some of the WSDL's out there in the wild. The errors it raises when you try to load such WSDL's can be incomprehensible to someone not familiar with the details of WSDL. As soap4r is quite complex, we weren't particularly looking forward to patching it to support NTLM and the troubling WSDL's either.

Word Custom XML patch and content controls

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:02:00 GMT

Today we tested the custom XML Word patch from Microsoft.
This patch was issued as a result of the i4i patent judgment.

It seems that our templates with custom XML are not impacted by the patch in Word 2007. We use content controls to manage XML in the templates. More info on the impact of the i4I judgment on Word can be found here.

Managing timesheets with Google Calendar

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:48:00 GMT

I just watched this Arrrrcamp video about the Timekeeper gem by Koen Van Der Auwera. Koen explains why he created a command line tool to manage time-sheets.
This triggered me to write this blog post.

Why ?

Filling in time-sheets is a task that needs to be performed every month in most service oriented organizations to prove work. (sometimes on a weekly basis)
For years, I used to write everything down in my notebook to keep track of things.

Because the XAOP team has grown to 7 people in the last year (who are usually working in small teams of 2-3 developers), it became more and more difficult to manage the billing for the different projects. It was time to look for a better/transparent solution to keep track of everyone's time.

Strake (Simple Transactional Rake)

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:56:00 GMT

Strake is a tool we developed internally here at XAOP, for certain specific tasks. Strake basically eases the development cycle in certain use-cases

In particular we use it when we have a project that mainly consists of transforming data from one representation to another (e.g. when we migrate documents from a legacy Documentum system to a newer Documentum system with a different layout). In that case it is often necessary to gradually apply changes to the data. To do this in a repeatable way we write Strake tasks which work very much like database migrations in that they are ordered.

The useful feature added by Strake is that it keeps snapshots from the state of the database before the strake task was run. This makes it possible to restart the process of running strake tasks from any point in time (if for example a mistake was discovered).

SharePoint workflows ... not your regular workflows

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:40:00 GMT

Workflow Foundation (WF) is a great new technology added to the .Net 2.0 Framework. It enables you to construct workflows using pre-build activities. Working with WF is made easy within the Visual Studio environment, where a point and click interface can be used to construct your workflows.

In SharePoint the same workflow mechanism can be utilized to write workflows that target SharePoint sites, webs, lists, … There are also extensions available for your Visual Studio environment that add extra specific project types for SharePoint workflows and extra activity types. A great way to work with SharePoint, using a tried and tested environment … Or so we thought… This post will give an overview of some of the specific things you need to think about when writing workflows for SharePoint.

One Month on Mac

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:52:00 GMT

Last month, I made the switch from my Ubuntu laptop to a Macbook Pro.
Thought I’d share my first impressions and give an overview of the applications that I found useful until now.

BRUG Meeting Report

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 23:32:00 GMT

This evening XAOP hosted the Belgian Ruby/Rails User Group(BRUG) meeting.

The first talk was about Typus by Marc Lainez from belighted. Then Elise Huard presented Tokyo Cabinet. Alain Ravet explained how we can optimize our ideas.

I think everybody enjoyed the 3 lightning talks, beer and pizza. We're looking for speakers and topics for our future meetings, so please let the list know, if you can help out. I talked to some nice folks from Mons, they expressed interest in helping host future meetings at their office or the university.