Tonight was the December Northern NJ MySQL Meetup, and Martin Adamec gave a presentation on the Content Management System, or CMS, that he’s implementing at work.

He’s using XML, XML Schema, XSLT and XForms to generate the UI for the CMS, as well as perform data validation to provide data quality controls. The work is done once when defining the XML Schema for a particular data entity, and the web forms are generated using XForms and XSLT. He’s doing this all using PHP’s XML support.

Thanks, Martin, for sharing your work and expertise with us.

Tags: MySQL, Meetup, Martin Adamec, XML, XSLT, XForms

Lately, I’ve taken an interest in Novell GroupWise Messenger (GWM) because it’s one of the messaging protocols that is currently supported by Pidgin. There are several open bugs and enhancement requests for Pidgin’s GWM support, so I figured I’d see how difficult it would be to get a development environment set up.

I started with the latest openSUSE 10.3 KDE live CD. Normally, I only run Debian by preference, but since Novell is the organization supporting SUSE, I hoped that using openSUSE would be the path of least resistance.

My understanding is that the minimal software required to get GroupWise Messenger working, and what I ended up installing, was:

• Novell ConsoleOne 1.3.6h
• Novell eDirectory 8.8
• Novell GroupWise Messenger 2.0.2 HP1

The openSUSE installation and all the Novell components fit neatly inside a 6 GB partition. Installation was relatively painless and configuration was straightforward.

The one snag that caused me a lot of grief was that the Novell GroupWise Messaging Agent (NMMA) process would keep segfaulting when I tried to connect with the IM client. Here’s the backtrace I recorded:

Thread 10 (Thread 0xb727eb90 (LWP 1091)):
#0  0x00000000 in ?? ()
#1  0xb7c59b3e in spmDDCAtLoginEndCallBack ()
   from /opt/novell/eDirectory/lib/libspmclnt.so
#2  0xb6dd63f8 in MgrCloseLoginSession ()
   from /opt/novell/eDirectory/lib//libnmasclnt.so
#3  0xb6dd7af3 in NMAS_ClientLoginEx ()
   from /opt/novell/eDirectory/lib//libnmasclnt.so
#4  0xb7c5a152 in SPMClient_PasswordVerify ()
   from /opt/novell/eDirectory/lib/libspmclnt.so
#5  0xb7c56bc1 in SPM_DDCVerifyPassword ()
   from /opt/novell/eDirectory/lib/libspmclnt.so
#6  0xb7cce6cf in SPMVerifyPassword ()
   from /opt/novell/eDirectory/lib/libndssdk.so.1
#7  0xb7c9b1d0 in DCVerifyPassword ()
   from /opt/novell/eDirectory/lib/libndssdk.so.1
#8  0xb7c96f50 in DDCVerifyPassword ()
   from /opt/novell/eDirectory/lib/libndssdk.so.1
#9  0x080b2c32 in ?? ()
#10 0x403b0001 in ?? ()
#11 0x08269b00 in ?? ()
#12 0x00000002 in ?? ()
#13 0x00000000 in ?? ()

Apparently, this is a problem with direct access mode to eDirectory. Changing the NMMA configuration to use LDAP instead got things working. I did this by editing /etc/opt/novell/messenger/strtup.ma, commenting out the dirreplicaipaddr line and setting the ldapuser, ldappwd and ldapipaddr lines. I didn’t configure it to use LDAPS (LDAP over SSL encryption), but in a production environment, I probably would have.

Finally, here’s a screenshot of everything (ConsoleOne, GroupWise Messenger client) running:

(click to enlarge)

If you’re looking for help with a GroupWise Messenger installation, feel free to ask me questions. If you’re looking for a consultant in the northern New Jersey area, I’d be happy to talk to you about what I could do for you.

Tags: Novell Groupwise Messenger, openSUSE, Linux, Pidgin

November’s MySQL Meetup was fun, having two new members attend: Jen and Mor. Pete also made it to the meetup, and the four of us talked about:

• popular modern web application development frameworks like Rails
• outsourcing software construction off-shore and why ISO9000, CMMI 5 and Waterfall may not be a good fit for rapid web product development
• the approach of agile development methodologies like Extreme Programming (XP)
• a pragmatic view of “Web 2.0” and what it means
• volunteerism through the Taproot Foundation
• pictographical repreresentation of relative measures of qualitative data (i.e., Consumer Reports “blobs” and Harvey Balls)
• jQuery UI, a set of themable widgets and interactions layered on top of jQuery, that simplifies building rich web user interfaces

As convenient as it is to meet at Panera Bread as meetup attendees can get themselves food and drinks easily, I’m somewhat disappointed with its management’s inability to manage the reservations for their private room in back. I really do want to start digging deeper into MySQL and try to get speakers to present to the group, and the unpredictable availability of the meeting room makes this frustrating.

Amy Kearns suggested that I call the local public libraries about hosting the meetup in their space. Apparently many now have free wi-fi and some may even have a projector we can use. Certainly, the price is right (free!) and the benefits of having a dependable reservation and possibly a projector, in my mind, outweighs the convenience of food and beverages at Panera.

So, for December’s meetup, I’d like to experiment by having the meetup at a public library. The currently scheduled date for the meetup is December 5th, the first Wednesday of the month. How many people think they can make that date? Of those who think they can, where are you travelling from? I’d like to pick a library that is centrally located for the majority of the people who plan to attend.

Please RSVP for the December meetup and in the “comment?” box, indicate if you have a preferred library where you’d like the meetup to be held–especially indicate if you’re already a patron of that library. Once I get some responses, I’ll start making calls and travel to some of these libraries to see which would work best for us.

I look forward to seeing you in December!

Tags: New Jersey, MySQL, Meetup

A few days ago, Pete Prodoehl twittered about Sierra Bravo’s F1 Overnight Website Challenge that will take place on March 1st, 2008, in Minnesota.

I’ve had a similar idea that I’d been mulling over in my head, a kind of “Geek Corps” where geeks donate their time and volunteer to help people in need with technology–with a focus on local organizations, not overseas.

Are there enough web developers in New Jersey (or who would be willing to travel to NJ for a day) who are willing and able to donate their time for such a cause? Considering the trouble I’ve had finding geeks in Northern NJ, I really don’t know.

I’m sure there’s plenty of non-profit organizations who could use the help, but I don’t have a good idea of who they are or how to reach out to them. If you are part of or know of a non-profit that would benefit from participating in such a competition, in New Jersey, I’d appreciate it if you’d pass along a link to this blog entry to them.

At this point, I’d love to hear from anyone who is interested in a similar event as the Overnight Website Challenge, but in New Jersey. I would be especially grateful for any help in organizing such an event or spreading the word about it.

I know that reviewing web referer logs is nothing new, but Google Analytics lets you filter your view. One use for this is to find search queries that were posed in the form of a question using the common question-forming words who, what, when, where, why and how.

Perhaps undocumented, but well-known to programmers, is the technique of concatenating terms with a pipe character (the “|”) which means “or”. This way, we can create a single filter containing all those words at once.

Try it out, see what kind of questions people were asking that resulted in a click-through to your site. Maybe you can add content to your site that better answers some of those questions and help future visitors who ask a similar question.

Tags: search, Google Analytics, questions, filter