28 Jan 2003

Tue, 28 Jan 2003

Miguel De Icaza's In The Spotlight

MSNBC reports on the progress made by Miguel de Icaza's Ximian team working on Mono, the open source implementation of microsoft.net. Could Ximian finally be headed for the mainstream? It's an interesting question. I'm not sure how much progress will be made until a massive educational effort is made with regard to helping the movers and shakers comprehend what it means to use, if not embrace and extend, GPL'ed software. I hear conversations on a daily basis in which decision makers make ill-informed and costly strategic blunders based on misinformation about the technology licensing implications. That's unfortunate, but it's going to remain a limiting factor for free software (particularly going beyond the installed hacker base) until an effective campaign is developed.

Posted at: 22:36 | permalink

Cocoon Portal For Imbeciles

If you're new to Cocoon, you'll find a comprehensive description here. I've been using Cocoon off and on since 1999 and have all of the appropriate battle scars from trying to get it running back in it's early days. Suffice it to say that the install and config for cocoon have come along way since the 1.x release. I've been researching portal technology for a project at work and came across Matthew Langham and Carsten Ziegler's article about the Cocoon Portal technology.

I decided to dive in and give it a try and I'm happy to report that using Java, Jetty, Cocoon, and the Cocoon Portal technology, I was able to get it running in about an hour. If you'd like to give it a try, follow the instructions below. I did this experiment on Redhat Linux 8. If you're on another platform YMMV. Of course, this assumes that you're an imbecile that knows how to do sysadmin on your target platform and has some level of comfort with Java. ;->

  1. Download and install the latest JDK for your platform
  2. Download and install the latest version of Jetty
    Installation shoul consist of expanding the zip and setting JETTY_HOME and JAVA_HOME appropriately. Test installation by issuing /usr/java/j2sdk1.4.1_01/bin/java -jar start.jar and load http://localhost:8080/ in your browser. You should see something like this.
  3. Put this file in JETTY_HOME/etc.
  4. Download the latest version of Cocoon
    I chose cocoon-2.0.4-vm14-bin.tar.gz. Unzip into the default directory. Create a cocoon directory in JETTY_HOME/webapps and copy cocoon.war from the root of the cocoon distribution to the newly created cocoon directory. Issue the following command in the newly created cocoon directory: jar xvf cocoon.war This will expand the cocoon web archive so that jetty can parse it. The cocoon portal technology can be found in the root of the expanded cocoon.war under a directory titled sunspotdemo
  5. Issue the following command to start cocoon: /usr/java/j2sdk1.4.1_01/bin/java -jar start.jar etc/cocoon.xml Wait for a message resembling the following: 18:34:14.660 EVENT Started org.mortbay.jetty.Server@1d8957f Open http://localhost:8080/cocoon/ in your browser. You should see something like this.
  6. Access the portal by typing http://localhost:8080/cocoon/sunspotdemo-portal in your browser. You should see something like this.
That's it! You're now running the cocoon portal technology successfully. Phew!

Posted at: 18:06 | permalink

Curly Quotes And Apostrophes - Oh My!

Thanks to Jeff for informing me that my XML feeds were broken. It was the use of unescaped curly quotes and apostrophes in an attributed quote that killed the feed. Sorry for the inconvenience if you saw the same amphetadesk problem that Jeff did. I used to test my own stuff in amphetadesk; I guess I should go back to that plan.

Posted at: 08:35 | permalink

Random Updates

Or man, have I been asleep at the wheel lately.

Eric has an interesting article on the nature of coders.

Jeff has completely redesigned his site and the look and feel is fantastic.

And I can't resist this one, where does the other Jeff find these Czech women? Heh.

Posted at: 00:40 | permalink