Author: Jeff Potts

Thoughts on Atlanta

There’s “busy” and then there’s “five-days-a-week-travel-for-a-project-with-a-hard-deadline-busy”. As is obvious by the dearth of posts it’s been the latter for me the last couple of months. Now that the project is over I thought I’d re-cap my thoughts on Atlanta, my temporary home-away-from-home…

  • MARTA is the only way to travel, especially between downtown and the airport. Departing Delta travelers can save time by checking their bags just as they exit the MARTA turnstyles rather than using the regular ticket counters in the terminal.
  • The bison burgers at Ted’s are delicious. You might think the chicken-fried chicken would also be good but you’d be wrong. You’re in a bison place–eat the bison.
  • Who knew? Chicken and waffles taste great together! Gladys and Ron’s Chicken and Waffles: Best. Cornbread muffins. Ever.
  • The Georgia Aquarium has whale sharks. Whale sharks! But go early–that place gets seriously busy during the day, especially on weekends.
  • In Little Five Points (or “L5P” if you’re into the whole brevity thing) has a great pizza place called Savage Pizza. The “white on white” was close to the ever-elusive “perfect white pizza” I’ve been searching for ever since enjoying one for the first time as a child on a family trip to Winter Park. Plus there’s at least three independent record stores within two blocks of the place.

Aside from the aggressive pan-handling, which is among the worst I’ve ever experienced, my only complaint is the whole sweet tea versus unsweet tea thing. I know Atlanta is a Southern City and serving pre-sweetened tea is part of the kitsch, but as an avid unsweet tea drinker, it’s a real pain. Every time you order unsweet tea it’s like you’re the first person that’s ever done such a thing. It really throws a kink in the works.
Me: “…and an unsweet tea, please.”

Server: “Sweet tea, you got it.”

Me: “No, unsweet. UN-sweet.”

Server: “UN-sweet?”

Me: “Yes, UN-sweet. Not sweet.”

[Server delivers the tea. I take a sip. My head snaps back in disgust.]

Me: “Sorry, this is sweet tea. I ordered UN-sweet tea.”

This scene replayed itself every 8 out of 10 tea orderings. I kid you not. Once, they actually filled my cup from the container marked, “Unsweet tea”, but someone had inadvertently filled the container itself with sweet tea, thus thwarting the server’s valliant effort at serving me correctly on the first try.

I tried to explain to the Atlanta-ites how crazy and inefficient it is to offer pre-sweetened tea. “Can’t they just let everyone sweeten it themselves?” I asked. Apparently they “brew-in the sweetness” and no one could possibly make it taste just right on their own.

So if you’re an unsweet (UN-sweet!) tea drinker, be sure to factor in some extra time for your lunch and dinner outings.

Is Documentum really “Opening Up”?

One of my former colleagues sent me a link to ComputerWorld’s recent article entitled, “EMC opens Documentum up to software vendors”. Pretty catchy, huh? You might think the leading proprietary ECM vendor has seen the light. Of course you’d be wrong. The article is actually about Documentum’s “Embedded Documentum” OEM offering. I don’t know, maybe I’m just being an over-sensitive open source zealot, but there’s nothing open about Documentum or its embedded offering.

And while I’m on the topic, if I were a software vendor, what would make me want to embed a proprietary offering like Documentum within my software? Wouldn’t it make more sense for me to use something standards-based and open? No OEM license to worry about. Easier to deal with in general. Low or no switching costs if it doesn’t work out. Access to all source code in case I need to make some tweaks. Seems like a no-brainer. It’ll be interesting to see what becomes of it.

Major blog cleanup

I spent some time doing the big tidy-up on ecmarchitect.com today. If you subscribe to my feed, you may be getting a bunch of old posts in your aggregator because I updated several old posts where titles were missing or where categories were set to “Uncategorized”. (I’m not sure I made the situation much better–I categorized most of those under “General”).

I also installed a new WordPress Theme–Ed Merritt‘s Ocean Mist. Most people get by on the feeds in their aggregator but for those who happen to drop by the site itself, Ed’s theme is obviously a huge improvement over the default.

I tried to fix missing titles where I could (posts from my Radio UserLand days are often missing titles), but it’s a daunting task to undertake manually. I might have to see if someone’s already written a script to take care of it.

Last, I implemented some anti-spam counter-measures. I may start turning comments on for selected posts. Posts in which I had accidentally left comments turned on had attracted several hundred spam comments so hopefully the new plug-in will keep it to a minimum.

Early look at Alfresco WCM

I’ve been using my recent travel time to have a look at Alfresco‘s Web Content Management (WCM) Preview Release 1 (download). The Preview Release does not include enough functionality to do an apples-to-apples comparison against existing competitors, but it does give you a feel for the templating functionality and virtualization.

At a high-level, the content authoring/publication workflow goes like this:

  1. A form is defined using XSD and uploaded to the Content Forms folder in the Data Dictionary.
  2. Forms are optionally associated with one or more XSL stylesheets to transform the content into any desired output format. (The XSD and XSL files are conveniently stored within the same folder).
  3. Content authors use a form to submit new content which is saved in the repository as XML. When it is saved, the XML is transformed into one format for each XSL defined for that form.

Creating XML content through templates

The templating engine is based on Chiba. Alfresco’s implementation exceeds what I’ve seen other vendors do with Chiba. The UI is congruent with the rest of the Alfresco web client and the form widget performance seemed quite snappy.

Alfresco’s WCM review guide uses the Hello World of the ECM market–Press Release–as its primary example. We can all relate to a Press Release, which is why everyone uses it, but it has its limitations. I’m anxious to see some advanced form functionality such as wizard-like behavior, complex validation, or form fields that are shown/hidden based on logic. But, again, this is only a preview. The example does include a run-time lookup to a JSP to get the options for a radio button, so that’s good. Ultimately it will take some real world examples (hopefully shared with the community) to show the full power of XForms.

Alfresco has said that the forms piece will be leverageable by non-WCM solutions built on the Alfresco platform, which is definitely important. Form submission is a low-hanging fruit for document management implementations. When I tried to create some form content outside of a web site folder, however, it didn’t work. I didn’t have time to figure out why. I’ll check on it again in a subsequent release.

Providing an isolated working environment through virtualization

The Virtualization Server is where we get our first glimpse of the Interwoven DNA Alfresco acquired to help drive the development of the WCM offering. Those who have worked with Interwoven TeamSite in the past will be instantly familiar with the concept of Virtualization and the Alfresco Sandbox. For those who missed out, a Sandbox is like your own personal snapshot of the website. It gives a content worker (I’ll use “worker” as a generic term to cover “Author”, “Publisher”, “Manager”, or any of the other terms that might have specific connotations to a particular WCM implementation) a way of seeing their changes before they are integrated into the site. Those changes might be to static pages, graphics, or even dynamic element such as JSPs. When multiple content workers are making changes to a site simultaneously, the sandbox model can be very efficient because everyone works in their own pristine environment until they are ready to integrate in the “Staging” area by promoting their changes.

The evaluation bundle comes with a separate instance of Tomcat that acts as the Virtualization Server. If you look in the work directory, you’ll see a web application for each user of each web site–these are essentially the sandboxes.

The first thing you’ll notice when you preview a piece of content is the URL. Out-of-the-box, Alfresco uses a public domain that their name server resolves to your loopback address. The sandbox webapp then takes it from there. This means that when you are running the virtualization server you’ll need either: (1) An internet connection or (2) Your own name server.

Because I frequently give disconnected demos I went with option 2. The high-level steps to get this working on my Ubuntu-based laptop were:

  1. Install bind9 (Follow steps here).
  2. Setup a zone file for my domain with a wildcard entry that resolves to my IP address (Follow rough steps here).
  3. Configure networking to use the new, local name server. In Ubuntu you can use the Networking GUI or update /etc/resolv.conf.
  4. Configure Alfresco to use my local domain for virtualization instead of the public domain by updating shared/classes/alfresco/extension/web-client-config-custom.xml (Read the Virtualization Configuration page on the Alfresco Wiki here).

What’s Next?

This preview achieved its desired goal–it gave us a tantalizing glimpse into the state of Alfresco’s WCM efforts. If you are implementing WCM in the next six months it is worth the time to download and play with the preview release.

The next big things to look for in subsequent preview releases are:

  • Integration of the Alfresco 1.4 jBPM Engine with WCM
  • Versioning and rollback
  • Content deployment

When those are in place and working, early adopters may have enough functionality to implement, and we’ll be able to do valid head-to-head comparisons with Alfresco’s competitors.

Living in Linux

When I joined Optaros I decided to live in Linux full-time. Previously I had several Linux VMware images I would just start up whenever I needed to work in Linux, but I really wanted to go whole-hog, so when I got my laptop I installed Ubuntu dual-booted with Windows.

It was easier to live in Linux full-time than I thought it would be. The only time I needed to go back to Windows was when I was collaboratively working on documents with Windows users. Although OpenOffice.org can read and write Office documents, and OpenOffice has all of the features I typically use, back-and-forth authoring between the two was painful, particularly when the Microsoft Office authors would use heavy formatting and styles. So, if I couldn’t get the document to look the same across suites, I’d throw up my hands and boot to Windows.

My Ubuntu install had a couple of annoyances. First, no matter what I tried, I could not get wireless to work. Less importantly, I couldn’t successfully recover from a hibernate.

Last week I decided to upgrade Ubuntu to the latest distribution, Dapper Drake. I settled in for what I figured would be a day-long slug-fest. It turned out to be much easier than I had expected–the Update Manager handled everything. The beauty of the upgrade, beyond being up-to-date on security and software patches, is that the upgrade fixed my wireless and hibernate problems.

So, long story short, my “Live in Linux” streak is now three months strong and more productive than ever.