Nuxeo Developers Blog

I1N on I18N

Lost In Translations

I've updated the book, again. I've added a new chapter to the book on how to make a Nuxeo bundle behave correctly in different locales:

Chapter 7: Internationalization and Localization

This is a chapter that is near and dear to my heart as a beginning (or dare I say intermediate?) student of la langue français. One thing that I didn't really get into this too much in the chapter, although it's important to me these days, is how quickly you can process (or misprocess) things when the language is your own. Some of the applications on my desktop here in Paris are in French and I find myself glancing at things like menus and thinking it says "Close File" when really it's saying something totally different. The brain can really play tricks on you when things are buried way down there will all that reptile stuff!

I have now put together 40 some-odd pages of text and images for Java programmers and have yet to put a line of Java code in the book! I think, though, we are reaching the limit of that and the plans for the next chapters will include some Java chicanery, although we are not yet ready to graduate from XML entirely...

Get Ready, CET, it's coming [H/T slashdot]

This coming saturday morning--maybe on your way home on the metro from a Friday night outing--Unix time will reach 1234567890. The CET time for this monumental event is:

Sat Feb 14 00:31:30 2009

Be ready. The world may end. Or not.

Already Dead, Yet Alive, Operating Systems Crack Me Up...but...

Look, I get a laugh out of reading the announcements of new (or rebuilt old) operating systems. I am frankly pretty skeptical that world needs a great many more operating systems now that it has 1 poor, big commercial, closed-source one, 1 good free, small-or-large, open source one, and 1 good, small-or-large, half-open-source-half-closed-source one. From a market standpoint, I'm not sure we need more since it's really unclear where the gap is that is going to be filled by something else that can grow into something better than either of these; the alternative of replace-all-at-once cannot even be accomplished by one of the largest, richest companies in the world and is, in my view, too much work to be useful.

So, this new Phatom OS would have been just another laugh-at-somebody-else's-expense... except something caught my eye.

The clever bit, at least to me when I read it, was that by targeting *only* virtual machines you can actually produce a situation where the underlying operating system doesn't matter much. This is clever and appeals to my sense of the macroeconomics (see above) since it allows you to get something small out the door, get some customers on it for some special/custom operations, and grow into something bigger.

I have somewhat reached this agnostic point already. Nuxeo is a large system, but it runs on basically anything that has a decent JVM. There are some "environmental" issues with windows that make it a bit tougher to support than Mac or Linux (either 32 or 64), but from the standpoint of 99% of the development, the underlying OS doesn't matter at all. So, all-of-the-sudden we have myriad gaps in the market! If the OS runs the JVM well (or the CLR, if you care) you can switch to it. That is the only thing that really matters to me anyway, and with the JCK it seems feasible that this could be guaranteed to a reasonable level of compatibility.

Once this is achieved--and it's not trivial--you can start differentiating your OS with extra Java packages that exploit super-cool-feature-X. Who cares what it is, it is something that *might* entice someone to stay on (get stuck with) the OS. Similarly, if you support some weirdo hacks in your OS that allows some JVM operation (or, better yet, a whole method or class) to run 10X faster, then you might be able to differentiate on performance. (This is risky, though, because the linux weasels will steal it in 10 mins! Look at the Tomcat native support if you need any more proof!)

This idea should have occured to me before. It strikes me, having thought through this now, that it might be the sole reason anybody wants Solaris anymore.

Learning Nuxeo (Book Draft)

Learning Nuxeo

I've been asked by some of the good folks here at Nuxeo to coordinate work on a new book about programming Nuxeo EP 5. Unlike the Nuxeo book, which is intended to be a reference to all the details of the platform, this book is intended to be more of a gentle introduction. This book will help readers gradually master the concepts in Nuxeo 5 (we hope the book will be ready by the time of Nuxeo EP 5.2 GA) and be able to develop software for the platform.

The first few chapters are gelling, and we've been looking for feedback. So, we've decided to gradually open up the book for comments from the Nuxeo community, or, I suppose, from any other community that can provide useful help!

My plan is to reveal a new chapter each workday or so, on the book draft's website, and perhaps try to highlight some of the good feedback I have gotten from the community about previous chapters.

Feeback Of The Day

In response to seeing an early draft of the book a couple of people asked "who is the book for and what's it about?" So, I added the prefatory material to try to give folks more of a "roadmap" to the book to help people see where it is going.

Please send your comments to ismith [at] nuxeo [point] com and I promise to try to incorporate them.

Presentation On "What Is ECM" by JM Pascal (in English)

What Is ECM?

Nuxeo 5.2 Milestone 4 Feature: Conversions and Previews

Exploiting OpenOffice

I decided to start off with the good stuff for this post. I couldn't really call this article, "How you really don't need Microsoft Office anymore because the open source tools are good enough" because I was afraid of Bill Gates. Or, to be more specific, I was afraid his hired goons; I would guess that he has the best goons money can buy, and lots of 'em! Anyway, if you haven't been following the progress of OpenOffice, you should catch up on things; the product has come a long way since of the ... cough, ahem.... "rough" builds of the early days. It runs really smoothly now, and being open source it's designed to allow other programs to leverage the great work that the Open Office (O-O) developers have done. (I am sure there is a climate-controlled cave somewhere for the poor slaves that toil away in anonymity on MS Office. I'm sorry, to those folks, for their working conditions, but the good news is that their company is becoming more like other companies now.)

The "leveraging the work of others" part is where this blog post connects with Nuxeo EP 5. Open Office (starting around version 2), exported a service that programs can connect to and use the imaging capabilities of O-O. The Nuxeo engineering folks did a number of nice things that use this capability--and we could only do this legally because we are open source too! Woo-hoo!

Seeing It In Action

I have mentioned the "Preview" tab that's now available in Nuxeo 5.2 milestone 4 in a previous blog post. One of the cool things that happens when you have O-O running on your system is that the MS Office formats "just work" in the Preview tab. O-O has to be running for this to work, so you should start it yourself if you want to play along with this post at home. So, to demonstrate, I've created a workspace with a few documents in it about cloud computing:

These are three files I found with google as demo material... I won't vouch for the quality of their information! These are, from top to bottom, a PDF file, a Powerpoint presentation, and a MS Word file. Lets see what happens if we click on the word file and then switch to the preview window:

So, what has happened here is that the MS Word document has been sent to O-O for conversion to HTML, then Nuxeo has rendered that converted version into a Preview pane. If you are a regular user of O-O, you are probably saying "Ho, hum, I've been doing that for years." Well, maybe you should revisit my previous post on annotating documents, huh? That little eye and the annotation service work for MS Word documents as it does for images:

As you would expect, the same holds true for the PowerPoint presentation--you can see it in the preview panel. Somewhat cooler, is you actually get some sensible controls to actually read the presentation as well. Here is a snapshot from the presentation:

Note the extra controls at the top like "Continue" (perhaps should be "Next Slide") and "Last Page." This is a pretty nice preview for not only not running MS Office, but not paying for it at all!

PDF Magic

So, of course, I'm going to show you a screen snap of a preview of a PDF document. Before I do that, I should mention that the PDF imaging is actually not being provided by the O-O system that I have been raving about but by another linux tool called pdftohtml that is part of the (very impression) popper PDF imaging project. Ok, here it is, sans any gratuituous annotations:

To return to my previous ranting about how cool O-O is, O-O does have a story to tell about PDF, but in the other direction. To generate a preview of PDF, as was done above, you need to render PDF and then figure out how to best display that in HTML. O-O is good at going to PDF from other formats, like those associated with MS Office. Thus, when you have OpenOffice available, you get a slightly different Summary tab as I am showing here:

The "Generate PDF" link will give you a PDF version of the document by rendering it with O-O and then sending it to your browser, without even needing a copy of MS Office! Sweet!

Internals Note

If you thought it was a little weird that you had to start up OpenOffice yourself to get these features, well, you are right. That was just to make it a bit easier to explain. In fact [extra coolness points here] there is a new part of Nuxeo 5.2 milestone 4 that manages a copy of Open Office for you, behind the scenes, if you configure your server to turn this on. Since Open Office is based on Java and Nuxeo is based on Java--and all three are open source--we actually use the OpenOffice code directly (rather than through a unix pipe or something) which should give us much better reliability as we move forward in the 5.2 GA release. There are a number of options about how you would like this to work, such as how many resources you are willing to dedicate to this slave version of O-O, in the configuration directory in the file ooo-config.xml.

I hope this gives you some hope that you don't have to keep paying the tax to run Office applications in the content of your content management system! If you have questions or comments about this article or anything else related to ECM or Nuxeo, drop them to me at ismith [at] nuxeo [point] com.

Post Scriptum

Secretly, over a period of about a year, I worked with folks at Fortune 500 company on a daily basis that were an MS Office-only company. They never knew I was not running Office...it's not a drop-in replacement or 100% compatible, but it is good enough, now.

Learning Nuxeo (Book Draft): New Chapter: Running Nuxeo

Another day, another chapter

Today, I've updated the book site with chapter 3 (really the second meat-n-potatoes chapter). This chapter explains a bit about how to run the Nuxeo server, how the Nuxeo server is related to JBoss and proposes some excercise for you to do to explore how to use Nuxeo. These exercises are probably "old hat" to folks with a lot of ECM experience, but if you are new to the genre you are likely to find them quite enlightening about how an organization can use the basic Nuxeo (and ECM) tech.

Great Feedback

After the website debuted yesterday the chairman of Nuxeo, Stefane Fermigier, suggested that I check out this new tool called Intense Debate. I have to say it was a good call! IntenseDebate is a tool for allowing you to get feedback about content on your website or blog. It's a bit better integrated if you put it on a blog, but some hackery allowed me to get into our tech-writing loop, so we can have pages that take your feedback, let you vote on other people's comments, etc Woot!

I hope you enjoy this installment and we'll be back tomorrow. You can, if you prefer, send me feedback the 20th century way by sending email to me : ismith [at] nuxeo [point] com.

Atlas, bye-bye, we hardly knew ye

Atlas Ventures Crashes

H/T to Trevor Smith on this one.

New Feature of Nuxeo 5.2M4 - Annotations

Annotations may, in fact, rock!

If you haven't played with the 5.2 milestone 4 release. yet, you should! There are some amazingly cool new things in there; I'm going to be trying to get through some of them this week--despite all my packing for my upcoming move!

If you aren't aware, there has been a work in progress with the W3C for some time create a standard called Annotea. The idea of this standard is to have inter-operable annotations on web pages (really URLs). So, being an open-source and generally standards-following sort of company, we used that standard to build this new feature into Nuxeo 5.2. That said, we had to extend it in some pretty cool ways to make it work well within nuxeo.

Previews

This should be the subject of a separate blog entry, but I'll put a bit here since you access annotations through the preview system. When you look at a document through the web UI now, you'll see a "preview" tab. This tab, based on how you configure the system, generates some HTML based on the content of the document--but without downloading it. What HTML it generates is configurable based on what its mime type is or what type of document "type" it is inside nuxeo. Don't worry, it's all totally down with the document model so it can understand documents that have multiple underlying files, documents that supply their own previews inside the document itself, etc.

Anyway, let's try it out:

In the image above, you see the first attempt by the new president of the United States to take the oath of office (more on that in a second!) on January 20th. You can see the first lady, the first kids, the president-elect Barack Obama, and the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.

(You should also note that you view the image and all its associated image metadata--like the data embedded in jpegs generated by digital cameras--through some of the other tabs above.)

You should notice two small icons left of the image. The first is the small "eye" in the upper left and the small triangle just to the left of the bottom of the image. The little triangle is an "open and close" gizmo for closing or opening up the annotation content.

I'm not too good with the names of the first kids, so I'm going to put an annotation on the image to see if somebody can help me. I do this by selecting a region of the image with my mouse and I get this:

In the comment box I type my question and then click "Submit." The result is this:

The "eye" control in the upper left turns off the highlighting of the regions in the image if you don't want to see the annotated regions.

So, I had some fun at the chief justice's expense. I added another annotation, just like before but this time to the face area of justice Roberts. Once I submitted this annotation, I then rolled my mouse over this "hot region" of the image and got this:

Playing With Text

Up to this point, I've been talking about images, so we were really in an area not specified by the Annotea spec. Much better covered, at least by the Annotea folks, is text. Let's trying doing something similar, this time with the text of the oath of office, which I've uploaded into Nuxeo. I uploaded flat text and got this in my preview tab:

You may think you know where this going....ok, you probably do. It works in a similar way to the image one:

By the way: If your instance of Nuxeo has a copy of open office installed and in use for format conversion you can annotate a ton of different document formats...

Relations and Audit

So, you think you're a hot-shot because you guessed how it would with text, huh?

But did you guess that it actually works, under the covers, using the Nuxeo relations system? It uses the mechanism of linking documents to link the annotations to the source document. If you want to download the file, you can get a "wad" that includes annotations and other associations.

Anybody out there a big fan of the Adobe PDF annotation tool (70 USD?) and want to comment on how it compares? Does Adobe have an annotation server? They have some text that references their "linkbase" but I couldn't find anything of substance... ?"

I also have it on good authority (e.g. I talked to the developers!) that all the usual Nuxeo auditing capabilities will be available when this annotation system is shipped in the first Release Candidate.

is this cool or what?

A New Image: A Bit Closer To Turnkey

Improved Image For Amazon EC2 Users

This instance is built from the Nuxeo EP 5.2.0.m4 distribution. Great work to all the folks who contributed to it!

I have built a new version, for those that want to have something closer to a "turnkey" image that they can run on amazon ec2. If you missed my previous blog post, then you may want to go back to it and make sure you have the proper background and understanding of amazon ec2.

The new image ami is:

ami-12997e7b

The major improvements with this AMI over the previous one (besides running 5.2.0.m4):

• The jboss server has been locked down somewhat so it's closer to something you can use without too much installation hassle. The most dangerous security problems have been dealt with. See /usr/local/nuxeo-ep-5.2.0.m4/banned for the removed parts of jboss and some more info. It's probably not production ready, but the worst offenders have been removed.
• The tomcat acceleration (libtcnative1.so) has been installed so that serving static files is basically the same speed as a native apache.
• Data in the repostiory is stored in postgres.
• There is proper configuration and a script to help you boot your instance so that you use the "big" disk on an instance that is mounted on /mnt on amazon.
• The server is configured to run on port 80 and binds to all interfaces by default.

This is not to say it's totally ready. There is still some work to do before it's truly "turnkey":

• Jena is not putting its data into postgres. I tried a great many different things, but could not convince it to use postgres, so I fell back to using Derby for annotations and relations.
• No automatic backups to S3 to make sure the data is safe (but it seemed silly to bother until the problem with Jena + postgres gets fixed).

What to do to use it

The image is 64 bit and I recommend using a m1.large image.

Once your image is booted, log into it as root and in your home directory use this command:

./instance-start.sh

After that, it'll take a bit to start up and you can see your instance by hitting your server with a web browser on /nuxeo and have fun!

Be sure to change your Administrator password!

Future restarts

The instance-start script does some things besides just start the server. It initializes the instance filesystem and sets up some database configuration that is needed to run nuxeo. After the first time, you should use the normal run and shutdown scripts in /usr/local/nuxeo-ep-5.2.0.m4/bin as is normal.

The script above tries to keep you from running it multiple times--this will blow up because databases already exist and other such state--so it is probably easier to just destroy the instance and try again.