Cedric Bosdonnat

OOoCon2006, it's over

cbosdonnat — 2006-09-19

Now the OpenOffice.org conferences 2006 are closed and the normal life has taken its old rythm now. This article is only about to thank you all for making this year's conferences a big event, quite like a family one.

Being prepared during several month by many persons on both OpenOffice.org and INSA Lyon side, my first thanks are coming to all those who helped us making it possible: Sophie, Marie-Jo, Jean-Fran�ois and Charles from OpenOffice.org and Yves Condemine, Patrick Pollet, C�dric Grand, Anne Mouriquand from INSA. I am sure to forget many persons here, but I think that they will recognize themselves.

To help us keep the conferences in our mind, the kiberpipa team who did an extraordinary job, provides us the video archives of the conferences and offers to host your photos of the event.

Again, thanks to you all.

Uno IDL syntax highlighting in PHP

cbosdonnat — 2006-08-20

Uno IDL is the component specification language of OpenOffice.org. Here is a solution to show some highlighted Uno IDL code. It uses GeSHi and you need to add a language file describing how to parse and colorize you Uno IDL code. As this language file doesn't exist I created one, attached to this article.

OOEclipseIntegration release 1.0.3.a

cbosdonnat — 2006-08-20

A new release is available on the usual update site.

http://cedric.bosdonnat.free.fr/ooeclipseintegration/

It mainly contains fixes for windows version as some code cleaning. This version warns the user that white spaces in the SDK or project paths may lead to problems of builds. This problem is due to some bugs of the idlc compiler and will be fixed in a future release of the OpenOffice.org SDK.

The next release will contain new interesting features like a Java skeleton generation, services.rdb or component exports, and may be URE application run in eclipse. Thus stay tuned...

Creating a new Funambol connector

cbosdonnat — 2006-06-28

This blog post will be about sharing what I learned around developping Funambol Connector. It is not intended to be complete or a replacement of any Funambol tutorial. However, I'll try to give some tips here to better understand.

Basic documentation

First things firsts, before anything else, you should have a serious look at the Funambol module development tutorial. This will guide you in the creation of a dummy connector. However, this paper is not complete enough for new developers. Thus I'll try to explain some difficult points here.

Take care of which API reference you are reading. The j2se and DS-server APIs are different with similar concepts and names...

Understanding modules

First of all, the tutorial is about modules and not connectors... what's the difference ? In fact a module is a general additionnal component to Funambol which contains one or more connectors.

As you might have understood from the tutorial, the module is composed of several parts:

The Java sources of you module, of course.
SQL scripts used for installing and uninstalling the module and connector in the Funambol DS server.
An optional install/install.xml ant script to run at the installation time
Dependencies libraries.

There are two things to develop to create a complete connector:

The Synchronisation source type class, which will access the data.
The configuration panel that will be shown in the Funambol admin tool for easy configuration of the new synchronization source type.

Why are SQL scripts needed and what are they for ? Funambol is connected to a database describing the connectors and their informations. Thus the informations about your new connector have to be stored in order for it to be used. These informations include the class name of the source type and the one of the panel. There are three possible SQL scripts:

create_schema.sql, to use if the module needs a custom data schema
drop_schema.sql, called when uninstalling the module to remove the data
init_schema.sql, called when installing the module to fill the data

SyncSource interface

The synchronization source type of your connector has to implement the ds-serveur SyncSource interface. These next lines will try to detail what the different methods are for.

Synchronization starting and ending

public void beginSync(SyncContext ctx) throws SyncSourceException;
public void endSync() throws SyncSourceException;
public void commitSync() throws SyncSourceException;

These methods are called to initialize and stop the synchronization. Thes can be used, for example, to start and stop a connection to the source. The commit method will commit the changes made during the synchronization to the source.

Element getters

public abstract SyncItemKey[] getAllSyncItemKeys()
    throws SyncSourceException;

This method will have to return all the items to synchronize in the source. This method is used in the synchronization mode. The result is an array of all the unique keys describing each element.

public abstract SyncItemKey[] getDeletedSyncItemKeys(Timestamp sinceTs, Timestamp untilTs)
    throws SyncSourceException;
public abstract SyncItemKey[] getNewSyncItemKeys(Timestamp sinceTs, Timestamp untilTs)
    throws SyncSourceException;
public SyncItemKey[] getUpdatedSyncItemKeys(Timestamp since, Timestamp until)
    throws SyncSourceException;

These three methods will return the deleted, new and updated items between the since and until timestamps. These methods are used in the fast synchronization mode. The result is an array of all the unique keys describing each element.

public abstract SyncItem getSyncItemFromId(SyncItemKey syncItemKey)
    throws SyncSourceException;

This method returns and item from its key. This is a difference between the client and server SyncSource interfaces: from the server side, using only keys and getting the item at the very last time helps to avoid big memory uses.

Elements setters

public abstract void removeSyncItem(SyncItemKey syncItemKey, Timestamp time, boolean softDelete)
    throws SyncSourceException;
public abstract SyncItem updateSyncItem(SyncItem syncInstance)
    throws SyncSourceException;
public abstract SyncItem addSyncItem(SyncItem syncInstance)
    throws SyncSourceException;

These methods will remove, add and update items in the source. The returned sync item correspond to the inserted or updated item. The update and add methods should solve the conflicts between the items that is already present on the server and the one that is about to be added or updated.

Extra methods

public abstract SyncItemKey[] getSyncItemKeysFromTwin(SyncItem syncItem)
    throws SyncSourceException;

This method returns the twin items keys, i.e. the keys of the items that are considered as identical. This notion of identical items is defined in this method.

public abstract void setOperationStatus(String operationName, int status, SyncItemKey[] keys);

This method is called by the DS-server to notify the status of an operation. The operation name can be either one of "Add", "Replace" or "Delete".

Configuration panel implementation

To create a new source configuration panel, you will need to extend the SourceManagementPanel class. The only thing to know here is to set the following properties into your synchronization source when clicking on the validation button. The validation method should contain the following skeleton:

if (getSyncSource() instanceof JCRSyncSource) {
          
        JCRSyncSource source = (JCRSyncSource)getSyncSource();
        source.setSourceURI(uriText.getText().trim());
        source.setName(nameText.getText().trim());
        source.setType(typeText.getText().trim());

        // TODO set your source specific values

        ContentType[] contentTypes = new ContentType[] {
            new ContentType("text/plain", "1.0")  
        };
        source.setInfo(new SyncSourceInfo(contentTypes, 0));
}

You just have to replace the TODO comment by lines setting the specific values to your source. Of course, you need to replace the JCRSyncSource class by your SyncSource class.

Apog�e synchronization, first howto

cbosdonnat — 2006-06-26

I'm proud to announce you that the Apog�e synchronization is now working. It integrates the Funambol j2se client API and configures it for you through preferences and properties pages. Split into three plugins, the synchronization allows you to write your own source connector. For the moment, Apog�e can now synchronize Jackrabbit local repositories, but this can be extended.
A guide to your first synchronization in Apog�e is available on the Apog�e website:
http://apogee.nuxeo.org/sections/documentation/jcrsync/synchronization-in/cpsdocument_view

Of course any comment or contribution is welcomed. You can join the Apog�e team on its mailing list. For this, just register here: http://lists.nuxeo.com/mailman/listinfo/apogee

Please hold the line for further news...

OOoEclipseIntegration release 1.0.3

cbosdonnat — 2006-06-26

I'm glad to announce that 1.0.3 release of the OOoEclipseIntegration
plugin is out. Here are the changes:

Basic URE support
User documentation
Developer documentation: Javadoc API completed and “howto extend” tutorial
Moving the language specific code into a new plugin
Ant scripts to automate the update site build
Internal model refactoring
Fixed some bugs

In fact there are many internal changes preparing future extensions of the plugin. For the user, the important new thing is the URE support. Now you can create a new UNO project using a URE instance, the type browser will show you only the URE types and in a future version you will be able to create a new URE application and run it.

The update site is still the same : http://cedric.bosdonnat.free.fr/ooeclipseintegration

Any report is welcomed and stay tuned...

Building Funambol from CVS

cbosdonnat — 2006-05-30

As I had some problems to find build howtos to build Funambol last week, I gathered the information people gave me on the Sync4J mailing list in to an article. Follow these instructions to build the Funambol 3.0 bundle for Unix or Linux.

Gathering the dependencies

In order to build the Funambol bundle, you will need several other softwares or components. There are listed below with a link to their download page and some comments if necessary.

Netbeans platform: no problem with netbeans, the latest version will do the trick
JavaCC: I tested using the 3.2 version, but newer version might work too
HSQLDB: no problem too, the latest version will be good
Java J2SE: download both JDK for build and JRE for inclusion in the bundle
JUnit: last version is ok
J2EE: there is a problem in the funambol ant scripts starting from J2EE 1.4, a fix is proposed in this tutorial. Using this fix, latest version can be used.
Tomcat: for inclusion in the bundle. Works fine using 5.0.30, but earlier version might work
Ant: the latest version works fine

Now that you downloaded all the dependencies, you will install them. To simplify this tutorial, I assume that everything will happen in the same <ROOT_DIR> directory and that neither Java, ant nor J2EE are installed. You may adapt the next steps to your existing installation if you want.

Extract Netbeans platform in <ROOT_DIR>
Extract JavaCC in <ROOT_DIR>
Extract JUnit in <ROOT_DIR>
Extract Ant in <ROOT_DIR>
Run JDK installation in <ROOT_DIR> using a command like

sh jre-1_5_0_07-linux-i586.bin

Run J2EE installation with the following steps and install it in <ROOT_DIR>/SUNWappserver

chmod u+x java_ee_sdk-5-linux.bin

./java_ee_sdk-5-linux.bin

The other archives should be left as is because they will only be included in the Bundle by the Funambol build scripts.

Getting the sources

Now that you have the dependencies, you will have to checkout the latest Funambol 3.0 sources from the CVS and configure them to find the dependencies.

Checkout the sources from CVS

In order to get the sources, go into the <ROOT_DIR> directory using the cd command and then execute the following commands:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.forge.objectweb.org:/cvsroot/sync4j login

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.forge.objectweb.org:/cvsroot/sync4j co 3x

When a password is asked during the login command, simply press enter. Now you should have a new 3x directory in your <ROOT_DIR> containing the Funambol 3.0 sources.

Configure

Now, you will have to change some values in Funambol properties files. First of all, edit the <ROOT_DIR>/3x/forge/build.properties file and change the following values:

javacc.home=<ROOT_DIR>/javacc-3.2
sunj2eesdk-rootdir=<ROOT_DIR>/SUNWappserver
tomcat.pkg=<ROOT_DIR>/jakarta-tomcat-5.0.30.zip
jre.pkg=<ROOT_DIR>/jre-1_5_0_07-linux-i586.bin
hsqldb.pkg=<ROOT_DIR>/hsqldb_1_8_0_4.zip

As you might have remarked in the preceeding value, I used the latest versions of the JRE and HSQLDB. You will have to adapt these values to the names of the files you have downloaded. You should also change some other values:

jre.name=jre1.5.0_07
tomcat.name=jakarta-tomcat-5.0.30
hsqldb.name=hsqldb

To obtain these values, just temporarily extract Tomcat, the JRE and HSQLDB the generated directories names will be your values.

To complete this configuration, set the following value in <ROOT_DIR>/3x/admin-suite/build.properties:

nbplatform.default.netbeans.dest.dir=<ROOT_DIR>/netbeans

Build

Last but not least, you will have to run to scripts to build the Funambol 3.0 bundle. For this, follow the next steps:

export CLASSPATH=<ROOT_DIR>/junit4.1/junit-4.1.jar

export PATH=<ROOT_DIR>/apache-ant-1.6.5/bin:<ROOT_DIR>/jdk1.5.0_07/bin:$PATH

export JAVA_HOME=<ROOT_DIR>/jdk1.5.0_07

Then go to the <ROOT_DIR>/3x/forge directory and run the following command to build the unix bundle. To get the list of all the targets available for the build, simply run ant without any target.

ant forge-bundle-unix

Now you can get the generated bundle in the <ROOT_DIR>/3x/output directory.

Bug for J2EE 1.4 and 1.5

In these versions of the J2EE, the jar used to build the pimweb module (j2ee.jar) is empty. Its content is now in javaee.jar. Thus you will have to edit the <ROOT_DIR>/3x/modules/pimweb/build/build.xml file and change the line

<property name="j2ee.jar" value="${sunj2eesdk-rootdir}/lib/j2ee.jar" />

into

<property name="j2ee.jar" value="${sunj2eesdk-rootdir}/lib/javaee.jar" />

For a better issue description and patch, please refer to the sync4j objectweb forge project.

Funambol JCR Connector: the first release

cbosdonnat — 2006-05-29

After a long time working on the JCR connector for Funambol, I finally created a first release for pioneers. As every very first release there are some important limits which are described further in the provided links.

For downloads and documentation of the JCR connector, you can report to the attached links. The final word here is: "stay tuned..."

Funambol JCR connector: a step more

cbosdonnat — 2006-05-04

I'm happy to anounce that the JCR connector can now return all the items or just the added or updated items. Deleted items are more difficult to check: thus their support is delayed.

What the JCR Repository needs

In order for the synchronization source to work, the JCR Repository will have to respect some constraints. They are described here:

The repository has to define the mix:synchronizable mixin type. This type is used to recognize the synchronizable nodes

A node is a synchronization item if and only if he has the mix:synchronizable mixin type

Each synchronizable node must define created and lastModified properties containing the dates of creation and modification.

Next steps

As you can imagine, the connector isn't finished yet. Its source still has to return the items content and add, update or remove nodes in the JCR repository. Thus stay tuned...

JCR server and Funambol

cbosdonnat — 2006-04-24

In order to setup a test framework for the Funambol JCR connector, I had to setup a JCR repository server. This blog entry, will guide you to set up the test tools. To do this you need:

to install and configure a tomcat server (I used the 5.5 version)
to deploy the provided jackrabbit-server (see link below)
to setup the jackrabbit-server servlet in order to use RMI access

Installing and configuring Tomcat

As Funambol Data Synchronization server already runs on a Tomcat server, you will need to change the new Tomcat listening ports. You can do this by editing the conf/server.xml file. To run and stop the server there are bin/startup.sh and bin/shutdown.sh in tomcat. I will assume here that the tomcat server containing the JCR servlet listens HTTP requests on 8081 port and the funambol one listens on 8080 port.

In order to use the manager in the next section, you will need to add a new user with manager role in conf/tomcat-users.xml

 <user username="admin" password="admin" roles="manager"/>

Deploying jackrabbit-server

To easily deploy the jackrabbit server, you just have to download the corresponding war file on the jackrabbit download page (see link below). Then, open the following URL in your web browser: http://localhost:8080/manager/html. There you will need to authenticate using the login and password you added to tomcat-users.xml (see the previous section).

From this page, select the downloaded war file and deploy it: it's done. You can use this page to reload the web application after some configuration changes.

Setting up jackrabbit-server for RMI

By default, the jackrabbit-server servlet only provide a WebDAV access to the repository, but you will be able to configure the RMI support easily by changing the WEB-INF/web.xml file to have the following lines:

     <init-param>

            <param-name>rmi-port</param-name>

            <param-value>1099</param-value>

            <description>

                The RMI port for registering the repository in the RMI Registry.

                If equals 0, the default port is used.

            </description>

        </init-param>

        <init-param>

            <param-name>rmi-host</param-name>

            <param-value>jcrserver</param-value>

            <description>

                The RMI host for registering the repository in the RMI Registry.

                If equals "" or missing, the default host is used.

            </description>

        </init-param>

        <init-param>

            <param-name>rmi-uri</param-name>

            <param-value></param-value>

            <description>

                The RMI uri for registering the repository in the RMI Registry.

                If missing, the uri is composed using the other rmi parameters

                and will have the format: //{rmi-host}:{rmi-port}/{repository-name}

            </description>

        </init-param>

As you can see it, these values are defining the RMI

listening port (default is 1099: you can leave this field empty)
listening host: I put jcrserver because we have 2 tomcat servers on localhost: to avoid confusion, this one has to be named differently. Note that I don't know if the host name has to match the machine name: this has to be tested
url of the repository. If you leave this field blank, default will be //jcrserver:1099/jackrabbit.repository in our case.

You should uncomment the following lines too and change to the right RMI url (see above for the url)

       <!--

            RMI url, if RMI remoting is needed

        -->

        <init-param>

            <param-name>rmi-uri</param-name>

            <param-value>//jcrserver:1099/jackrabbit.repository</param-value>

            <description>The URI for the RMI connection.</description>

        </init-param>

Testing with Funambol

Before considering to have a working tomcat repository server, please check that the server has been launched as root. Otherwise you might experience some end of file problems at runtime. To check if the RMI registry is correctly launched, execute netstat -l: you should have the following line:

tcp        0      0 jcrserver:rmiregistry      *:*                     LISTEN

Then, you will have to download the latest Funambol JCR connector sources on Nuxeo SVN (see links below). You will need to build both org.nuxeo.sync.jcr and org.nuxeo.sync.jcr.extensions modules and deploy them into Funambol (see the projects README files for detailled instructions).

Then use funamboladmin program to create a new JCR source instance. You will have to set

the handler class name to org.nuxeo.sync.jcr.jackrabbit.RmiHandler
the JCR repository source URL to //jcrserver:1099/jackrabbit.repository
the workspace can be left empty to use the default JCR workspace.

Now you should be able to test this connector using the Funambol command-line client. There is nothing to synchronize as the methods aren't implemented in the connector yet.

Thus stay tuned...