Portal containers: Supporting the vision of technology-agnostic applications?

April 15th, 2009 • Internet, Java, Ruby, portal
Tags: linkedin

I’ve been looking at Liferay recently. It turns out to be a fantastic portal container. It’s core is not necessarily better than it’s closest rival JBoss Portal, but it comes with a mammoth selection of portlets out of the box. Also, with the support for the portlet standard being adopted across multiple technologies, you’re not locked into Java for new functionality – in fact, i’m currently building a portlet in Ruby. On top of that, the core system is covered (exactly how covered is unclear at the moment, but we’ll gain that awareness soon), in Selenium RC integration test scripts. Perfect! All that’s missing is an adoption of BDD stories, but that can be added.

One warning – accessibility not out of the box

Liferay’s out of the box portlets are not accessible! It’s a known issue and Liferay want the community to support them in fixing this. Seems like a reasonable request and it’s lack of focus on accessibility stems most likely out it’s origins in USA. They care less than the brits about this stuff!

Tutorials

I’ll post tutorials as i progress through my Ruby portlet development and integration.

Furthering the quest to *get* agile

April 15th, 2009 • 1 comment Productivity, Uncategorized, agile, programming
Tags: linkedin

My academic learning focus has been a bit off recently, what with the amount of work i’ve had on. But, no excuses – my quest to grasp the academic history of agile delivery is taking steps forward, with my digging into DSDM. I’ve decided to focus on DSDM due to its UK-centricity, which I feel will have the greatest short term impact. I’ll get to SCRUM, XP, RUP, et al when i get to them.

I started the quest ages ago and have progressed it, but more in practice than in reading. Now’s the time for the reading to pick up again…

What is a DSL?

April 15th, 2009 • Ruby, dsl, programming
Tags: linkedin

I tweeted a link to this url, but didn’t blog it. I should have, so here it is:

What is a DSL?

It got me all excited so i’ve started (slowly, i’ll admit) to write my own DSL in Ruby. I’ll post how i get on.

iPhone 3.0 beta 2 tethering how to

April 3rd, 2009 • 9 comments Apple, Internet, Mac, iPhone

In iPhone 3.0 beta 1, tethering didn’t work. In beta 2, it does and it’s really simple to achieve. It does require a quick mod to your iPhone. Here’s what you have to do:

1. Download the o2_uk.ipcc carrier details file. Please note that this is the UK ipcc file. If you’re not on O2 in the UK, search google for your suitable ipcc file.
2. Connect iPhone to PC / Mac and select to restore with the option to select a custom restore package (hold down option on Mac before selecting restore)
3. Select the ipcc file as the restore package. The change of details on the phone takes only a few seconds and doesn’t require an iPhone reboot
4. Go into iPhone Settings app > General > Network > Internet Tethering and enable.
5. Connect iPhone to PC / Mac over USB or bluetooth
6. The PC / Mac will do the rest
7. Done!

Works great (i’m posting via tethering now)