I just ran across the latest release of Open Office.org (version 2.2.) which includes the holy grail of database development: Base. This version contains a built-in database that moves into the realm of filemaker for ease of use. It allows power users to develop tables, views, queries, forms, and reports inside of OpenOffice. What’s more, once you have registered the database, you can use it in the other parts of open office (like Writer and Calc). This is the way it ought to be.

It now looks like Open Office is a perfect development environment for DBAs that need to unroll database solutions for clients. It is available on just about every OS under the sun so there are no compatibility issues. All of the databases are stored in the Open Document format – so a database can be shared and copied.

What really interests me, however, is the fact that these great tools can work with existing SQL databases like MySQL with minimal hassle. That, and the fact that the DBs are stored in an open format.

Here’s the idea: Dataface can create .odb files (the database file format for Open Office) on the fly that will allow users to interact with the database application using the quick and easy Open Office interface. For some things, a web interface is just too clunky. I’m not sure how deep this rabbit hole goes, but I intend to explore it to its limits to see just how much Dataface can be integrated with Open Office.

If you’re a web or software developer, chances are you’ve been frustrated before by the inconvenience of having to SSH into the remote server all the time to work on files. You can’t use the cozy development environment you set up on your own machine. You have to use the server’s tools. (If you really like command line vi then this post isn’t for you).

What if the server doesn’t have the programs installed that you need to do your thing? If you don’t have sufficient access, you may have to get the admin to install the programs for you, and often times they won’t.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just mount the server drive and work on the site like they were sitting on your local hard drive? I just discovered SSHFS, which allows you to do just this.

Apparently SSHFS (secure shell file system) has been available for some time on unix/linux, but there was no equivalent on Mac OS X until recently: The MacFUSE project enables SSHFS and many other types of file systems to be mounted just like they were a local hard drive on Mac OS X. Its as simple as opening SSHFS, entering your connection information and your server hard drive will be mounted in finder like it is a local drive. You can run all of your favorite programs on the files.

In my case, what I needed to do was run a patch using then patch command. The server didn’t have patch installed, so I mounted the server using SSHFS and used my local version of patch to patch the files. What a time saver!

This ranks as the best thing since sliced bread in my books.

Okay.. I’m still at this Plone 2.5 upgrade thing. The early reports saying that the upgrade from Plone 2.1 to 2.5 is a snap are indeed correct. Unless you are using CAS for authentication.

Since Plone 2.5 uses PAS (Pluggable Authentication Service) which is very different than the way 2.1 handled authentication, it is necessary to do away with the old way to do CAS auth.

Begin rant ….

The single biggest complaint about the Plone/Zope community is that they think that backward compatibility is optional. They don’t think twice about breaking old code in favour of new features. Undoubtedly PAS is a superior way of handling authentication and permissions than the old way, but couldn’t they make it backwards compatible with the old way of doing things. It is ridiculous to think that every time I have to upgrade to a new version that I have to spend a week or two feeling around the bugs and bases of the code and configuration just trying to make it work again. This paragraph is written out of anger and frustration…. bahh!!

End rant …

Okay, back to rational thinking. Here is what I have done so far:

1. Downloaded CAS4PAS 1.0.0-1 and installed in the Products directory.
2. Restarted Zope and added a CAS Helper to the acl_users folder of my Plone site – then copied the settings across.
3. Downloaded and installed the new version of PloneCASLogin (because the old version doesn’t work with PAS).
4. Went to a different browser and tried to log in using CAS.
5. The login button takes me to the CAS login page OK, but when I return to the Plone site, it says that there was a sign-in failure.

At this point I went back to the download pages for the Plone CAS Login and CAS4PAS products to see if I was missing anything. I noticed a patch to make it compatible with CAS 2 (not sure if my server is CAS 1 or 2, but I thought I might as well download it anyway to see if that was the problem.

1. Downloaded and ran the patch
2. Restarted the server and tried to log in — same problem!
3. Scoured the internet for information from others having the same problem. Found one helpful post here.
4. It suggested that I try to disable the “Challenge” feature of the credentials_cookie_auth in acl_users.
5. Same problem!

That is where I sit right now… No clues, so I’ll dig deeper into the code and see what I can find….

Okay.. the time has come for us to migrate from Plone 2.1 to Plone 2.5 on the Faculty web site. The word is that this migration should be much easier than the migration was from 2.0 to 2.1.. so here is a little log of my experience:

• Given that requirements for Plone 2.5 include Zope 2.8.7+ or 2.9.4+ and we are running 2.8.5, I put in a request to the network support guys to upgrade Zope. They upgraded to 2.10.1 (which would seem to meet the requirement of 2.9.4+) and gave me the reigns.
• Tried migrating the dataface site using the portal_migration tool. The migration appeared to be successful, so I proceeded to do a version migration on the portal_atct tool. That migration also appeared to be successful. Wow! Was that ever easy! But wait a minute …..
• When I tried to visit some of the pages of the migrated dataface site, I received “404 resource not found” errors. Something went wrong, but what?
• I then took a step back and tried something simpler: adding an empty plone site using the ZMI on a default Plone 2.5 install. The installation failed with errors.
• I began to suspect that Plone 2.5 was not compatible with Zope 2.10, so I did some googling and found out that indeed it does not work. The requirement of 2.9.4+ actually means 2.9.x where x >= 4 – and NOT x where x > 2.9.4.
• Then I got another bright idea: The requirements listed on the plone site for Plone 2.5 were identical to the requirements for Plone 2.1.4. We were running Plone 2.1.2 fine on our Zope 2.8.5 box so I thought maybe the 2.8.7+ requirement might be lax on the last digit, and that 2.8.5 would work. WRONG! It didn’t work.
• Sent in a message to the network guys asking for a different Zope install (we’ll eventually have to upgrade to Zope 2.10 for Plone 3, but that won’t be for a while.
• Now with my newly installed Zope 2.9.6 instance I was ready to go to town.
• I ran a migration on the dataface site using the portal_migrations and portal_atct tools, and tested the site out. The migrations went smoothly (took about 20 minutes, but everything works tickity boo).
• The Faculty site is another story. We are using CAS authentication on the site so that users can use the SFU single-sign on features and we don’t have to handle passwords. Apparently Plone 2.5 using PAS (Pluggable Authentication Service) which is quite different than the old system and doesn’t support migration of CAS User Folders. Hence the migration in portal_migrations failed.
• Googling on the internet led me to a number of pages describing this issue. Apparently the current workaround for this is to delete the CAS User Folder and do the migration, then install CAS4PAS – an alternative CAS product that works with Plone 2.5. The problem is then I think we may lose all of the user roles, groups and permissions. 🙁
• To be continued ….

I have recently discovered the joy of RSS subscriptions first hand.  Before RSS, the only way to stay informed of the news and events that interested me was to subscribe to the appropriate mailing list.  This resulted in a cluttered mail box.  Last week I downloaded an RSS news reader for OS X called Vienna, and I started subscribing to the RSS feeds of the web sites and message forums that I enjoy.  Wow, is this empowering.  No longer do I have to spend an hour surfing the web to see if there is anything new on my favourite sites – or on the Dataface forum.  Now I just have to check Vienna and see if there are any new posts.

I have recently become more annoyed with spammers and their deceptive tactics.  Especially since I have launched some web sites recently that leaves me open to receive more spam.  I found this interesting article that goes over some of the developments with larger corporations like AOL and Microsoft engaging in court battles with spammers.

This is a follow-up on my experimentation with PHP compilers.  After trying Bcompiler and choosing not to use Zend Guard, I tried out Source Guardian.  It will compile PHP into byte codes for either PHP 4 or PHP5 using a command line executable (or a GUI in Windows).  The PHP file is encoded in place and can be used just as if it wasn’t encoded at all.  You only need to copy a directory of dynamic php extensions into a parent folder of the script (e.g. the web server’s document root would work fine) which are used to decode and run the encoded script.

I tried this out and it worked flawlessly.  Not only that, but this product opens doors to add limited licensing to your products.  You can, for example, set an expiry date on code, or stipulate that the code can only be run on a certain IP or MAC address.

All I can say is that I will definitely be purchasing this product and I recommend it for anyone who distributes PHP source code and doesn’t want to give away all intellectual property.