Two more soldiers down

Double your pleasure, Double your fun

This has been a busy week on the book front and general purpose Nuxeo chicanery. I've got a number of things cooking right now so that I can show off features of the platform. Both of these features are of the "should be available to the public soon" type, so I've had to actually garner time from the developers to get them to give me demos and let me capture screenshots. I hope both of those posts are available tomorrow. I have the text of one written and the other should not be a major hurdle.

I've completed two more chapters, one fairly short one about XMap and Apache Commons Logging. I think it's only fair to admit that I really dislike Apache Commons Logging beacuse it gives people the distinct idea that writing more logging frameworks is ok. I can't believe the Apache Foundation green-lighted a meta-framework for logging when they already had log4j. Oh well. The other part of the short chapter is about the XML un-pickling code we use, which is packaged up into the library XMap. We use this all over the place in nuxeo to read in snippets of XML and turn it into Java objects.

The more meaty chapter is about Users and Groups. I got a lot of help, particularly on understanding directories and the test infrastructure needed for UserManager, from Anahide T. Big props to her! In this lesson, we construct a new class that interacts with the UserManager to create a new Group. Although it doesn't do that much, there is quite a bit to working with the UserManager service because of the wide variety of situations in which Nuxeo can be deployed. We have to work with flat text files, databases of user records of all sorts, and LDAP to be good enterprise citizens. I think that folks that read this chapter will come away realizing, more than anything, that messing around with users and groups in a big organization is serious business!

As always, the whole text can be found at http://www.nuxeo.com/static/book-draft.