Blog
Posted by Peter Vanbroekhoven on Aug 04, 2010
Comments
The past two days I've been on a veritable odyssey trying to deploy a Rails 3 application on Ruby 1.9.2, complete with sirens leading me astray with their seductive song and six-headed monsters nearly killing me. It's an adventure alright.
We have been using a home-brewed time management application based on Google Calendar for a while now at XAOP and we are pretty happy with how it works. We decided to rewrite it from scratch in Rails 3. Determined to live on the edge on this one, we built it on top of Ruby 1.9.2 and threw ourselves at its new features such as the new hash syntax.
Two days ago the time had come to deploy a first version. The original application was deployed on Heroku, but Heroku supports neither Ruby 1.9.2 nor Rails 3.0.0 RC. We need the latter for a feature introduced after the fourth beta. The same goes for Engine Yard's cloud platforms. And thus, in a heroic move, we decided to deploy the application ourselves on Amazon EC2. Having done this before, this seemed like a good idea in anticipation of support from Heroku/EY.
Continue Reading…
Posted by Peter Vanbroekhoven on Jun 26, 2010
Comments
A client recently challenged us to create in a few days time a
scalable full-text search on more than one SharePoint system. We always like
a challenge, and as we see more and more clients make the move to
SharePoint so the experience will serve us well, we accepted.
Continue Reading…
Posted by Peter Vanbroekhoven on Apr 21, 2010
Comments
At XAOP we have been using our ActiveDCTM library for several years now to connect to Documentum systems from Ruby code. In this article we want to help you get on your way to using it yourself as successfully as we do.
Continue Reading…
Posted by Joeri Samson on Apr 13, 2010
Comments
This post will introduce you to ActiveCMIS with the public repository running the Alfresco CMIS implementation.
To start with it will only demonstrate some of the reading functionality.
Continue Reading…
Posted by Peter Vanbroekhoven on Apr 09, 2010
Comments
Today we release two new libraries from the safe XAOP stable into the wild.
At XAOP we are constantly faced with the need to interface with new systems, and new to our repertoire are SharePoint and CMIS.
SharePoint is Microsoft’s take on content management. It is a collection of products and software elements that includes web browser based collaboration functions, process management modules, search modules and a document-management platform. We decided to add Sharepoint to our repertoire as we experience more and more businesses integrating Sharepoint in their information sharing environments.
Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is a new set of standards and web services ,backed by industry giants such as EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, that ensure interoperability among different content repositories. Almost every large organization has a collection of legacy ECM repositories, closing those down or migrating content out of them can be cumbersome and expensive, sometimes near impossible. Building a CMIS interface and federating access and viewing may well be the best option.
Continue Reading…
Posted by Julien France on Mar 05, 2010
Comments
1) Why Using OAuth:
Have you ever built an application that needed access to user data from a third-party application like Google Apps, Twitter, Facebook, …? In the following post we will examine how to do this with Oauth and Google Apps
Continue Reading…
Posted by Stijn Pint on Feb 10, 2010
Comments
In one of our projects we need communication between a custom Ruby on Rails application and an SAP system.
In short: the Rails application is analyzing data from different sources, doing some calculations with it and the results should be sent to SAP.
The way we do this now is by writing csv files to a specific location on a fileserver, in SAP there is job that polls this directory every 15 minutes.
As a first step, and to test a real SAP-Ruby interface, we would like to send an event to SAP when the csv files are in place, so that we can eliminate the polling job.
Continue Reading…
Posted by Stijn Van Vreckem on Feb 05, 2010
Comments
The demand for migrations to Microsoft SharePoint continues to grow, as the platform rapidly becomes the standard for organizations seeking a centralized knowledge repository and collaborative workspace.
I'm happy to announce that we've integrated SharePoint in MirrorNG (the content integration product for XAOP). We will offer support for Microsoft SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 in the coming months.
We are also looking at integration with CMIS.
I'm excited about the options SharePoint and CMIS will give us architecturally speaking.
Screenshot of our SharePoint MirrorNG test environment. 
Whether it will be
- migrating between SharePoint sites and Documentum repositories,
- upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to 2010,
- reorganizing your SharePoint content,
- archiving from SharePoint sites to EMC Documentum repositories,
- synchronization of content, metadata and security between Documentum and SharePoint.
Continue Reading…
Posted by Peter Vanbroekhoven on Jan 28, 2010
Comments
As more and more of our clients start using SharePoint, we have been investigating how to connect to a SharePoint server using Ruby. SharePoint has a full-fledged set of SOAP services that we can address from Ruby. The SOAP client library bundled with Ruby, called soap4r (also available separately), didn't work for us on SharePoint.
First off, SharePoint usually requires NTLM authentication and soap4r does not support it. Also, soap4r has problems with some of the WSDL's out there in the wild. The errors it raises when you try to load such WSDL's can be incomprehensible to someone not familiar with the details of WSDL. As soap4r is quite complex, we weren't particularly looking forward to patching it to support NTLM and the troubling WSDL's either.
Continue Reading…
Posted by Stijn Van Vreckem on Jan 27, 2010
Comments
Today we tested the custom XML Word patch from Microsoft.
This patch was issued as a result of the i4i patent judgment.
It seems that our templates with custom XML are not impacted by the patch in Word 2007.
We use content controls to manage XML in the templates.
More info on the impact of the i4I judgment on Word can be found here.
Posted by Stijn Van Vreckem on Dec 04, 2009
Comments
I just watched this Arrrrcamp video about the Timekeeper gem by Koen Van Der Auwera.
Koen explains why he created a command line tool to manage time-sheets.
This triggered me to write this blog post.
Why ?
Filling in time-sheets is a task that needs to be performed every month in most service oriented organizations to prove work. (sometimes on a weekly basis)
For years, I used to write everything down in my notebook to keep track of things.
Because the XAOP team has grown to 7 people in the last year (who are usually working in small teams of 2-3 developers), it became more and more difficult to manage the billing for the different projects.
It was time to look for a better/transparent solution to keep track of everyone's time.
Continue Reading…
Posted by Joeri Samson on Dec 03, 2009
Comments
Strake is a tool we developed internally here at XAOP, for certain specific
tasks. Strake basically eases the development cycle in certain
use-cases
In particular we use it when we have a project that
mainly consists of transforming data from one representation to another
(e.g. when we migrate documents from a legacy Documentum system to a
newer Documentum system with a different layout). In that case it is
often necessary to gradually apply changes to the data. To do this in a
repeatable way we write Strake tasks which work very much like database
migrations in that they are ordered.
The useful feature added by
Strake is that it keeps snapshots from the state of the database before
the strake task was run. This makes it possible to restart the process
of running strake tasks from any point in time (if for example a
mistake was discovered).
Continue Reading…
Posted by Gitte Vermeiren on Oct 21, 2009
Comments
Workflow Foundation (WF) is a great new technology added to the .Net 2.0 Framework. It enables you to construct workflows using pre-build activities. Working with WF is made easy within the Visual Studio environment, where a point and click interface can be used to construct your workflows.
In SharePoint the same workflow mechanism can be utilized to write workflows that target SharePoint sites, webs, lists, ... There are also extensions available for your Visual Studio environment that add extra specific project types for SharePoint workflows and extra activity types. A great way to work with SharePoint, using a tried and tested environment ... Or so we thought... This post will give an overview of some of the specific things you need to think about when writing workflows for SharePoint.
Continue Reading…
Posted by Stijn Pint on Sep 18, 2009
Comments
Last month, I made the switch from my Ubuntu laptop to a Macbook Pro.
Thought I’d share my first impressions and give an overview of the applications that I found useful until now.
Continue Reading…
Posted by Stijn Van Vreckem on Aug 27, 2009
Comments
This evening XAOP hosted the Belgian Ruby/Rails User Group(BRUG) meeting.
The first talk was about Typus by Marc Lainez from belighted.
Then Elise Huard presented Tokyo Cabinet.
Alain Ravet explained how we can optimize our ideas.
I think everybody enjoyed the 3 lightning talks, beer and pizza.
We're looking for speakers and topics for our future meetings, so please let the list know, if you can help out.
I talked to some nice folks from Mons, they expressed interest in helping host future meetings at their office or the university.
Posted by Gitte Vermeiren on Jun 18, 2009
Comments
Next to development on EMC Documentum, we are now also taking on projects that provide document management solutions on SharePoint Server. SharePoint gives you basically the similar set of functionalities like storing documents together with metadata, and also provides a versioning and workflow management framework.
Off course we would like to reuse our existing efforts done in Ruby on EMC Documentum on other systems as well, so also on SharePoint Server. For this we can not use standard Ruby as we would like. Instead we started looking at IronRuby, the Ruby implementation on the .Net Framework, since all SharePoint development is based on .Net. (Yes, we know, there are also quite a lot of Web services we can utilize, but let's leave those out of the question for now).
To get a view of the possibilities we did an extensive test of IronRuby's possibilities on some SharePoint sites and we can now say these tests were quite successfull. The full story of how we accomplished this and how you yourself can try out some dynamic coding on SharePoint Server, can be found in our labs section.
Posted by Stijn Pint on May 20, 2009
Comments
For one of our Rails projects, I needed a simple solution to run some background tasks on demand of the user (various calculations or data imports which can take several minutes to complete).
There are several solutions out there, like Starling, Workling, backgrounDRB ,… but I really wanted something without too much complexity. Another catch: our project is running on a Windows production server… yeah, I know…
Continue Reading…
Posted by Stijn Van Vreckem on May 05, 2009
Comments
We got some questions about the use of Documentum 6.5 and Ruby with ActiveDCTM.
My article at EMC Developer site explains the use of Ruby on Documentum 5.3.
One of our clients is moving to Documentum 6.5 so we are now testing ActiveDCTM on a CENTOS Linux Oracle environment with Documentum 6.5 sp1.
In Documentum 6 the C/C++ DMCL API has been replaced with the Java‑based DFC API.
These core changes, while extremely significant, are largely transparent to the DFC user.
C/C++ applications (like DCTMRuby and ActiveDCTM) that interact directly with the DMCL continue to work as a copy of DMCL continues to be provided.
New Documentum 6 features are not available through DMCL, however.
Here is a simple example on how to create a document from the IRB customized command line.
Continue Reading…
