Blog@Case Topics: web applications

ITS Status meets Twitter.

2008-12-08T20:34:46Z

Last year, we did some experiments using Twitter as an internal notification tool. I had whipped up some code to tie it to Rover, which was the internal network status tool that we used until October 2007. After Rover was decommissioned, the Twitter account went dormant. Last week, I took it out of mothballs, changed the name, made it public, and connected it to the ITS Status blog using Twitterfeed. Who knows, maybe I can convince some of the other engineers to provide updates as well... So, if you want the latest ITS status updates on Twitter, follow CaseITSStatus.

A simpler time tracking

2008-04-23T19:44:03Z

37Signals In/Out - Something along these lines (but not this exact thing) seems like a much better way to do time tracking than what we're using now.

A change to Docshare

2008-01-04T19:51:13Z

Due to some misconfigurations, fixes to those misconfigurations, and fixes to the fixes, it's become necessary in certain cases to use a slightly different URL to access WebDAV on Docshare. For your personal folder(s), you should still be able to use the URL: https://docshare.case.edu// However, for users you've been given permission to access their folder(s), or if you're a non-admin user of an organizational folder, you'll need to use a URL something like: https://docshare.case.edu/dav// This has to do with the way that VTFileman creates the Apache .htaccess and .davaccess files.

A brief presentation about Case IM and Docshare

2007-09-21T16:59:22Z

This morning, I gave a brief demonstration of Docshare and Case IM to the ITS Planning and Advisory Committee. I made some slides with the new presentations tool in Google Apps. I've just uploaded a slightly enhanced version of them on Docshare, so check it out.

Bedework Calendar

2006-08-07T20:01:51Z

I first looked at Bedework a few months ago, and it seemed pretty primitive to me - just a fancy event calendar. I just looked at it again and it looks like they've made a lot of progress, adding personal calendars with CalDAV access, RSS feeds and other features. It's not quite in a position where we would want to adopt it, I think, since I can't figure out any way to invite people to my meetings, and setting up authentication outside of the built-in database consists of "configure Tomcat to talk to LDAP or CAS". It also seems a little slow to me, but I am just running the quickstart version with embedded HSQLDB, and it's dumping tons of debugging output on the console, so those two factors may have something to do with that.

GVC.Sitemaker

2006-08-03T18:30:32Z

GVC.Sitemaker, the open-source version of the University of Michigan's UM.Sitemaker. It's not quite a wiki farm, but it is pretty interesting looking.

WebObjects

2006-03-07T21:12:06Z

I've been toying with Apple's WebObjects a bit lately - partly due to an on-the-horizon project that's written with it, and partly due to the fact that I've wanted to try it out since the days when it cost $50K, required coding in Objective-C and ran on NeXTSTEP. Of course, now it's pretty much free, requires coding in Java, and runs on Mac OS X (but with a little luck and effort, applications are deployable on most any J2EE container). It's pretty interesting so far. You can deploy (rudimentary) applications with very little code - I wrote an insanely simple app that copied from one textfield to another, and it only required writing one line of Java. There's also the "Direct To Web" deployment option, which, given an EOModel (more on that later), will generate an entire skeletal application for you much like Ruby on Rails. Lastly, there's a "Direct to Web Services" option, which can build SOAP Web Services (using Apache Axis, apparently - I haven't tried the D2WS option yet) based on your model. EOModeler (one of the applications in WebObjects), is really interesting. It can scan the schema of a JDBC or JNDI(i.e. LDAP) store and allow you to graphically connect together the relationships between your tables, and then (optionally) generate the necessary SQL or Java code to re-create the database again (for, say, an installer). There are some things I don't like - check out the URLs for products at store.apple.com - they're horrendously long, and not easily bookmarkable - there's a session ID built into the URL, though with a little mod_rewrite magic, you might be able to cope with them a little better. As far as I've read, the closest to WebObjects in the regular J2EE world would be Cayenne (for object modeling) and Tapestry (as the web framework). Outside of J2EE, it's similar to a lot of the MVC web frameworks coming out, such as Rails or Catalyst.

Open Source Portfolios

2006-02-15T17:40:26Z

Open-Source Portfolios I've started playing with this just a tiny bit and it seems pretty nice. It may require some slightly more serious hacking to integrate with LDAP and the like, but it's definitely interesting.

Unified Messaging and Mail forwarding

2006-02-13T21:24:18Z

So, many users have been converted over to Unified Messaging from the old DirecTalk voicemail system. If you're one of them, you may have noticed some peculiar things about how the system works: 1. You actually get two copies of each voicemail message - one in your INBOX and one in a separate folder called "UM-Messages". This is in order to be useful to the two different camps of users we have on campus (POP users and IMAP/Webmail users), and the two different methods of message access (via e-mail and via telephone, or "TUI"). Since we try to be everything to everyone, we set up what's known as a "System-level Sieve filter" that checks each incoming message and does the special delivery if it's a voicemail message. 2. Mail forwarding causes some strange behavior, or does things you don't want it to. When mail is forwarded, the UM-Messages copy doesn't occur, so you don't get to check your mail via the TUI, only through your forwarded mail. We're looking into some more automatic workarounds for #1 for power users (i.e. those who only want one copy of the message or the other, and not both). Stay tuned... To solve #2, Joel Kraft actually went to the trouble figuring out enough to write some of his own Sieve templates to add into Delegated Administrator. They did require a couple of minor edits before they were working 100% correctly, but they're in there now. Here's how to use them: 1. Go to Delegated Administrator and log in 2. If you are currently forwarding mail, turn that off, and turn mailbox delivery back on- it sounds counter-intuitive, but trust me on this one. 3. Now go to the "Set Mail Filters" view. (Unfortunately, this tends to render weird in Firefox, but looks fine in IE or Safari). From the menu, select "Forward Everything (Copy Voicemail). Make up a name for the rule, and enter the e-mail address you want to forward to. 4. Click OK, and then save your rules. You're done.