I recently had an experience while working with a customer that has prompted me once again to post about what it taught me. The requirement that drove this experience was the necessity for a Maven/AntHill build and deploy automation for CQ package and OSGi bundle deployments. In order to make sure that all our code (bundles, jsp and design) was deployed simultaneously, we decided to take advantage of the “install” directory that can be located as a child of an “/apps/myApp” directory in CQ. This “install” directory is treated as a watched directory by the OSGi installer, and so any jars in that directory will be auto-installed upon installation of the package…or so we thought…
Archive for the ‘Interactive Development’ Category
OSGi Bundles, Apache Felix and Versioning
Thursday, March 3rd, 2011JQuery and Form Validation
Monday, September 27th, 2010Today I ran into an interesting issue with the combination of the jquery.uniform plug-in in combination with the jquery.validate plug-in. The issue arose because a client had delivered me a very nicely styled contact form, skinned with the Uniform plug-in for JQuery, but the validation they had used on the previous iteration of their site was a somewhat clunky Javascript function with only a standard browser alert box if any required fields weren’t filled in properly.
Solr Search, Stop Words and DisMax Search Handler
Thursday, July 1st, 2010Yesterday I ran across an interesting issue while troubleshooting a Solr (Lucene-based search server) issue for a client. Basically, the client has a CQ 5.3 implementation, but for various reasons they decided to use Solr for search on their site as opposed to using the built-in JCR search. No biggie, but they eventually noticed the following issue: say a page is named “The Black Cat was Crossing the Street”, if a user enters “the black cat was crossing the street” they would get no results. However, if they entered “black cat crossing street” they would get the expected page OR if they entered “the black cat was crossing the street” as a phrase-search (with actual double quotes surrounding it), they would also get the expected result.
Blog Trickery Using XML-RPC
Monday, June 28th, 2010I was recently asked by a client to explore a proof of concept to create a servlet within the CQ system that could receive requests via XML-RPC from a mobile or desktop based WordPress blogging application and basically trick it into thinking it was communicating with a WordPress blog. The idea was to let the authors of their blog pages have the flexibility to use pre-existing blogging applications without having to limit the pages themselves to rely on pre-fabricated blogging solutions such as Blogger, WordPress, or Movable Type.
HTML5 After a Glance
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010It’s been a little while since my last post, the reason for this being that I’m settling into a pretty rigorous schedule with my new contract, and have not had a chance to do much experimenting. After my last post, which was a response to Steve Jobs’ “Thoughts on Flash” article, I decided that my next little programming experiment should be to explore (at least preliminarily) HTML5 and start to formulate an idea for myself of the pros and cons of this new markup language.
Re: Steve Jobs’ “Thoughts on Flash”
Thursday, April 29th, 2010Steve Jobs recently posted the following article on Apple’s website, presumably to speak to the masses of people asking why the company is refusing to entertain support for Adobe’s Flash plug-in on their mobile devices. You can read the article here: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/, and then feel free to come back and read my thoughts…on his thoughts.
OSGi Bundles…creating reference to BundleContext
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010This week I was tasked with a relatively complex task by a client, which is requiring me to create an OSGi component that directly interacts with other OSGi services within the repository. My experience with OSGi being relatively minimal, I ran into a little snag: how to reference other OSGi services (a service can be an Interface or a Component) in the repository from MY OSGi component.
Removing a page of your site from Google’s cache
Thursday, April 15th, 2010So if you’ve been following this blog at all, you’ll know that I have spent the last few weeks implementing the new Asual S.E.O. method with SWFAddress 2.4 on my portfolio site. This method has been largely successful, and I’ve been supplementing it with Google’s Webmasters Tools which I have largely found very helpful.
Pure Actionscript gets funky when loaded into Flex
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010I’m currently working on a pet-project which for various reasons requires me to build a component in pure Actionscript, but have it be versatile enough to be loaded into either a Flash application or a Flex application. One would think that, being as Flex is basically just a framework for Actionscript components, this would not be to tall of an order, however every time I try to do some interactive combination of both platforms, I wind up with some seriously crazy behavior of some sort.
Interesting New Feature in CQ 5.3
Thursday, April 8th, 2010So I’m on-site with a client in Phoenix, and I was directed to perform a “test-upgrade” to their CQ 5.2.1 code, to see how smooth the upgrade to 5.3 would be. It was a pretty good experience all-in-all, but I thought I would share a couple minor hiccups with the audience, just in case they may save some of you some time and frustration later.