I decided to go to the next talks:

• Hitchhiker’s Guide to TYPO3 v5: This was a talk to summarize the work done during the last year on FLOW3 and TYPO3 v5 projects. There were some things repeated from the tutorial and he mainly talked about persistence and REST services, every operation that could be done in TYPO3 backend will use web services. A good presentation with videos and so on, I liked it.
• Continuous Integration for FLOW3: A good talk about Continuous Integration in TYPO3, it works really nice perfectly integrated on TYPO3 forge running all tests in 3 platforms (Mac, Linux and Windows). It uses Hudson, and he explained about how to use it for particular projects.
• Intelligent web forms: As a Formidable collaborator I can miss the only talk about forms in the conference. They talked about the extension FormMaker that allows to manage forms from backend. Something interesting is that it allows to define some steps in a form, dividing it in several pages defining a workflow; they manage it with sessions and it has a drawback because you couldn’t have two forms with different data in two browser tabs. It seems a very powerful extension, maybe quite complex in the beginning but I should test it to give my opinion about it.
• Transparent Object Persistence with FLOW3: Karsten started talking about DDD (Domain Driven Design) and explain the different concepts of that approach: repository, aggregate, entity and value. This is the base of FLOW3 persistence framework that defines a Content Repository in which objects are stored automatically. A good point of this repository is that you can mount a relation data base and use it as an object with the API of the repository. There is a tool called TYPO3 CR Admin quite useful to see the stored date.

Finally I didn’t attend to the Best paper award event because the “Spanish” people (Nivel Siete, ICTI and Igalia people) went for a walk to get an overview of Berlin. We took the underground till Alexander Platz and we returned walking to the hotel seeing a lot of monuments.

In this TYPO3 conference I tried to catch as much information as possible about FLOW3 and TYPO3 v5 and these talks refreshing my concepts about Software Engineering (AOP, DDD, TDD, …). Furthermore they recommend a lot of books about Software Engineering you can see the further reading section at FLOW3 website. My conclusion about these projects could be that there’re a lot of things to do and one of them is improve the performance, if they get it FLOW3 will be a great framework and TYPO3 will have a great source code.

Congratulations to the organization of this great conference and also to Igalia for let me live that great experience.

The day started with the Keynote by Kasper, it was shorter than I expected but quite amusing. The next year will be a TYPO3 Conference in Dallas (USA) but it should not replace to the conference in Europe, it means that TYPO3 community is growing and it’s good.

After the Keynote I went to the next talks:

• DEV3 - TYPO3 Enterprise Development: DEV3 is an Eclipse plugin to work with TYPO3 4, FLOW3 and TYPO3 5. It has a TeplateView that allows to users to modify TypoScript from Eclipse, users can edit constants and setup sections, moreover it has syntax highlighting, syntax checking, auto-completion, … for TYPO3, FLOW3 and TypoScript (mental note: “I have to test this plugin”).
• CSC2: Bringing CSS Styled Content to the next level: This was a talk about CSS, but it was very general and I don’t like it so much, maybe because I don’t usually have to fight with CSS or because I already knew the most of the things that she said.
• OpenEMM - Sending out Newsletters with TYPO3: An extension to send newsletters that integrates OpenEMM into TYPO3 backend. For that extension you need OpenEMM, an open source Java application, and it doesn’t provide anything special compared with TC Directmail (tc_directmail), so if tc_directmail doesn’t fits your requirements maybe this new extension could do it.
• Business Case - Marketing Open Source Software: Another quite general talk about marketing in open source companies, he recommended a book “The Cluetrain Manifesto” and talk about that in open source companies there’re 4 C’s, the common 3 C’s of marketing (Corporation, Customers and Competitors) and Community.
• Touchless Security with FLOW3: An explanation about how the security framework works in FLOW3. It uses AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) to can intercept every method that is going to be executed and through ACLs (Access Control Lists) the framework allows or denies the execution of any method. The most important here is that you don’t have to take care about security in your code, only have to define a concrete ACL and never modify your code.
• Test Driven Development using FLOW3: He explained the concept of Test Driven Development in which you have to write tests for all your code and before write your code, in that way you define the APIs before write it. FLOW3 has a Testing package based on PHPUnit that make easy write unit tests. I think that it’s a very interesting idea about how to develop an application. Karsten also talked about Test Driven Design, because some time you are doing design while you write your tests.

That day was a long day because of the conference dinner and the party after that. Not a very good day talking about the talks but a good social day.

I’m in the TYPO3 Conference, today I’ve attended two tutorials: development with FLOW3 and a workshop for creating TYPO3 websites.

Robert Lemke was the author of the first tutorial, it showed a mixing of his podcasts about FLOW3. The great new was that there is already implemented a complete blog system like buzz.typo3.org with FLOW3 using the content repository as persistence mechanism (quite interesting see that actually some stuff works). However the main problem is still performance (Robert said that it shouldn’t be difficult to fix) but the development context is currently very slow. Some brief comments about this tutorial:

• Classes define actions, methods that are going to be called from outside.
• All objects are single instantiations (Singleton Pattern) if you don’t mark them as prototype.
• If you depends on another class you should use Dependency Injection defining a method that is going to be called automatically when the class is instantiated.
• He gave an overview about Domain Driven Design, in a roughly way we can talk about 3 concepts: entities (objects), values (immutable objects) and aggregates (entities that are going to be searched).
• Talking about persistence we need a repository for each aggregate, if we extend the basic repository we’ll have common methods to add, remove, find, … (other entities will be stored transparently). The content repository need that the type of class attributes is specified through comments.
• Finally he talked about REST services, and all repositories are going to be services that will be called automatically to the concrete method depending if there is or not some GET parameter or if there is some POST parameter.

The second tutorial was a workshop from jweiland.net, they gave some useful receipts that can be applied in any TYPO3 projects. They talked about a tool to clean TYPO3 installations, it seems very useful because in big projects usually you don’t know how file you need or not in your filesystem, they don’t say the name of the tool but I can guess that it’s the cli_dispatch.phpsh script (more info) I have to test it!. Other comments:

• Use UTF-8 for the database from the beginning (it’s always good to remember).
• For TypoScript they recommend to create a library in a system folder that could be used in other projects (exporting/importing), these TypoScript templates will be used with Basic Templates and defining constants.
• Moreover it’s possible to detect syntax errors in TypoScript using the Object Browser and the Template Analyzer.

I’ve enjoyed this first day so I’m going to rest to be prepared for tomorrow.

PS: I’ve met some people from Colombia (Nivel Siete) and we’ve been talking Spanish in Berlin .

If you want to use this new feature you’ll need an account at Box.net, a web service that allows users to store files online, and set this account at MyTime preferences.

Moreover MyTime 0.2 is integrated with Online Desktop because it’s using the Online Desktop account system to store the Box.net account. We’ve developed a library (libmytime-common) that has the responsibility to manage the account data depending on if there’s an Online Desktop session, when it uses the Online Desktop account system, or not, then it uses the GNOME Keyring.

Feel free to test this new release, we’ll be glad if you give us your feedback.

PS: MyTime is on Softpedia.

En resumen, antes de realizar el proceso de renovación debemos establecer la contraseña del dispositivo software de seguridad de Firefox. Una vez hayamos hecho este paso ya podremos realizar la renovación, teniendo en cuenta que debemos seleccionar Grado medio en la página de Generación de claves.

Pulsando en Ciudadanos, Renovación de certificado y Solicitud de renovación llegamos a la página en la que empieza el proceso de renovación.

Después de unos pasos sencillos (pulsar en Aceptar, seleccionar nuestro certificado y hacer clic en Renovar certificado) llegamos a una página Generación de claves en la que aparece un sencillo formulario en el que podemos elegir entre Grado alto y Grado medio para el campo Longitud de clave, en el cual aparece seleccionado por defecto el valor de Grado alto. Aparece un mensaje indicándonos que debemos seleccionar 1024 como longitud de clave, lo cual nos hace dudar de que opción debemos elegir ya que no sabemos si 1024 es grado alto o medio, además Grado alto aparece ya seleccionado por lo que parece que debería ser el valor correcto.

Pero cuidado ya que aquí debemos seleccionar Grado medio si queremos que todo funcione correctamente, en caso contrario no recibiremos ningún error pero cuando intentemos descargar nuestro certificado renovado obtendremos un mensaje de error que nos indica que no existe ninguna solicitud pendiente. Para resolver este problema tuve que utilizar el formulario de contacto del CERES e intercambiar un par de correos electrónicos con ellos.

Después de hacer clic en Enviar solicitud en la siguiente página pulsaremos primero Firmar para luego Enviar la solicitud firmada.

Para firmar la solicitud tenemos que seleccionar nuestro certificado y a continuación introducir una clave maestra en el campo que aparece después del siguiente mensaje “Para confirmar que está de acuerdo en firmar este mensaje de texto usando el certificado seleccionado, por favor, confírmelo introduciendo la contraseña maestra“.

En este campo debemos introducir la contraseña del Dispositivo software de seguridad de Firefox incluso aunque no tengamos establecida ninguna contraseña para este dispositivo, primero tendremos que especificar una contraseña para luego poder utilizarla en este proceso.

Para establecer esta contraseña debemos ir a las preferencias de Firefox (Editar>Preferencias) a la opción Avanzado y en la pestaña de Cifrado hacer clic en el botón Dispositivos de seguridad. En la siguiente ventana seleccionaremos Disp. software de seguridad y utilizaremos el botón Cambiar contraseña para establecer la contraseña que deseemos.

Una vez establecida esta contraseña podremos realizar el proceso de renovación completo sin tener ningún problema, y a los pocos minutos de realizar la solicitud de renovación podremos descargarnos nuestro nuevo certificado renovado desde la página Descarga de certificado.

Espero que esta explicación os pueda servir de ayuda para renovar vuestros certificados o al menos me sirva a mi de recordatorio para cuando tenga que volver a renovar mi certificado digital dentro de 3 años.

PD: Muchas gracias a Quique por darme una pista acerca de la contraseña maestra y el dispositivo software de seguridad.

You can download the Debian packages to test it, any comment or suggestion will be welcomed.

In future releases we’re going to add support to store information recorded by MyTime on a Web Service, in order to can query this information from any computer. Moreover we’ll try to use Online Desktop to store the data needed to login at Web Service.

You can read more information about this project at MyTime home page and return your feedback using different resources (mailing lists, forums, tracker, …) at SourceForge.net page.

We hope you enjoy this application and find it useful .

PS: MyTime is now translated to Spanish and Galician.

This extension is very useful for multilanguage websites improving work efficiency in tasks related with internationalization and localization.

Last days I’ve been working on this extension, and I’ve done some changes to add new features that make this extension more powerful. The main modifications are:

• Added the possibility to create translations for more than one page or record at the same time.
• Support to translate records of any table.
• Use generic configuration variables.

You can download the last release 1.2.2 directly from TER or if you like you can download the source code from the SVN repository:
svn checkout https://forxa.mancomun.org/svn/gltransstat

Moreover in the following phases we’re going to try to integrate this project with Online Desktop trying to store information about application use remotely so that you can query information about your time everywhere.

The project is been developed by some people from Igalia engineering group: Antonio, Diego, Quique, Iván, Chema, Loren, Xavi and me.

Among other technologies MyTime uses:

• GTK+ and Glade for the graphical interface.
• GObject for data server and model logic implementation.
• D-Bus usage for communication between components.
• SQLite database system for local data management.

You can read more information about the project in its home page at Igalia community. Furthermore the project has its own page at SourceForge.net where you can find mailing lists, forums, and SVN repository of the project.

There’re a lot of things todo, however feel free to test MyTime and give us your feedback, we’ll be very happy.

We’ll keep you informed of news in this project.

If you develop TYPO3 extensions, specially frontend forms, you should test the extension called Ameos FORMidable (ameos_formidable), with this extension you can develop TYPO3 extensions very fast. After more than one year developing TYPO3 applications, I think that FORMidable is an essential TYPO3 extension; I’ve fallen in love with it.

Furthermore FORMidable actually is a free software project, at project’s homepage there’re links to documentation, SVN, a lot of examples, and mailing list. In this list you can ask, suggest, send patches, etc. and somebody from FORMidable community is going to try to help you, besides FORMidable authors accept patches to improve FORMidable or fix some bugs; I’ve sent several patches and they’ve added my modifications to project.

This post has only the purpose to announce that I’ve published my first article at FORMidable web page.

Finally I’d like to thank to FORMidable development team, specially to Jerome Schneider, for give me the opportunity to collaborate in this great project and for accept my ideas and patches trying to improve FORMidable.

I’ve followed the instructions from OnlineDesktop/Jhbuild, but with these instructions you need to compile 101 modules, it’s quite slow, moreover you can find some problems in different modules that aren’t stables. I need to upgrade to Hardy Heron 8.04 to can finish my compilation.

However, thanks to Dape, I’ve found another solution to test Online Desktop faster only compiling 6 modules: hippo-canvas, local-export-daemon, desktop-data-model, online-desktop, bigboard and mugshot-client.
Maybe this isn’t the best way to test Online Desktop, but it’s very quickly for a simple test.

Next I’m going to relate instructions needed to test Online Desktop on an Ubuntu Hardy Heron distribution.

First at all I have to say you that you should use a new user to compile Online Desktop. I usually use sux when I’m compiling:

sux - newuser


Furthermore we should install dependencies before start to compile to avoid future problems. Dependencies from Ubuntu Jhbuild dependencies:

sudo apt-get install gnome-common build-essential doxygen subversion automake1.4 automake1.7 automake1.8 cvs git-core docbook docbook-utils docbook-xsl flex bison texinfo python2.5-dev lynx mono-gmcs libtiff4-dev libxtst-dev libgdbm-dev libxml-simple-perl libelfg0-dev libcupsys2-dev libldap2-dev libexchange-storage1.2-dev libxmu-dev libpam0g-dev libgpgme11-dev libfreetype6-dev libpng12-dev libxrender-dev libxi-dev libexpat1-dev libbz2-dev firefox-dev libxcursor-dev guile-1.8-dev libxdamage-dev libxcomposite-dev libmono-cairo2.0-cil xnest libxft-dev libloudmouth1-0 libloudmouth1-dev libxss-dev libxkbfile-dev libjasper-dev libnl-dev ppp-dev libdv4-dev uuid-dev libpcre3-dev libsqlite3-dev libpurple-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev xulrunner-1.9-dev gtk-doc-tools libgnome-desktop-dev automake

And some new packages, because we’re going to compile a few modules and need some packages:

sudo apt-get install python-cairo-dev python-gtk2-dev libhippocanvas-dev python-hippocanvas libgtk2.0-dev python-gtk2-dev libpanelappletmm-2.6-dev libpanel-applet2-dev libsoup2.4-dev python-gnome2-dev libcroco3-dev


Firstly you need to install Jhbuild, I paste here instructions from OnlineDesktop/Jhbuild. First create a folder od and the structure needed:

mkdir ~/od
cd ~/od
mkdir checkout
mkdir install
mkdir -p install/var/lib/dbus
ln -s /var/lib/dbus/machine-id install/var/lib/dbus


Now get and install Jhbuild:

cd ~/od
svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/jhbuild/trunk jhbuild
cd jhbuild
./autogen.sh ; make ; make install


At this moment we need a file ~/.jhbuildrc with the next content:

# -*- mode: python -*-

# if you have a GNOME svn account, uncomment this line
#repos['svn.gnome.org'] = 'svn+ssh://user@svn.gnome.org/svn/'

moduleset = 'online-desktop'

modules = [ 'meta-online-desktop' ]

# This will take a long time, and conflicts with the jhbuild cairo
skip = ['mozilla']

# what directory should the source be checked out to?
checkoutroot = os.path.expanduser('~/od/checkout')

# the prefix to configure/install modules to (must have write access)
prefix = os.path.expanduser('~/od/install')

# Use system libraries for the builds
addpath('PKG_CONFIG_PATH', os.path.join(os.sep, 'usr', 'lib', 'pkgconfig'))
addpath('PKG_CONFIG_PATH', os.path.join(os.sep, 'usr', 'share', 'pkgconfig'))

# Look in /usr/share for icons, D-BUS service files, etc
addpath('XDG_DATA_DIRS', '/usr/share')
# Look in /etc/xdg for system-global autostart files
addpath('XDG_CONFIG_DIRS', '/etc/xdg')

# We need to add the gtk-2.0 directory explicitly to the Python path since '.pth'
# files (here pygtk.pth) only work properly in system directories
import re, sys
python_version = sys.version.split()[0]
python_version = re.sub(r"^(d+.d+).d+$", r"1", python_version)
lib_packages = os.path.join(prefix, 'lib', 'python' + python_version, 'site-packages')
lib64_packages = os.path.join(prefix, 'lib64', 'python' + python_version, 'site-packages')
if lib64_packages in sys.path:
    addpath('PYTHONPATH', os.path.join(lib64_packages, 'gtk-2.0'))
else:
    addpath('PYTHONPATH', os.path.join(lib_packages, 'gtk-2.0'))

# Rebuild faster
os.environ['INSTALL'] = os.path.expanduser('~/bin/install-check')

# Use the standard system bus
os.environ['DBUS_SYSTEM_BUS_ADDRESS'] = 'unix:path=/var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket'

os.environ['UNDER_JHBUILD'] = 'true'

# Flags needed to 'pyorbit'
os.environ['CFLAGS'] = '-lz'

# Params for mugshot-client
module_autogenargs['mugshot-client'] = autogenargs + ' --with-gecko-sdk=/usr/lib/xulrunner/sdk/ --with-gecko-idl=/usr/lib/xulrunner/sdk/idl/'

You have to check which jhbuild you’re going to execute, you have to use ~/bin/jhbuild.

Before to compile the modules we need to do:

jhbuild -m bootstrap buildone waf


Then we are going to compile these few modules:

jhbuild buildone -a hippo-canvas local-export-daemon desktop-data-model online-desktop bigboard mugshot-client


To test an Online Desktop session we have to create a file /usr/local/bin/run-online-desktop with the next content:

if [ -x $HOME/bin/jhbuild ] ; then
   exec $HOME/bin/jhbuild run dbus-launch --exit-with-session od-session
else
   zenity --error --text="No JHBuild session found for user $USER"
   exit 1
fi

And make it executable:

chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/run-online-desktop


Now we have to create another file /usr/share/gdm/BuiltInSessions/online-desktop-jhbuild.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Online Desktop (JHBuild)
Comment=JHBuild of Online Desktop
Exec=/usr/local/bin/run-online-desktop
Icon=
Type=Application

Finally we can start a new session with the user that we’ve compiled Online Desktop and test it (maybe when you start an Online Desktop session at first time you have to close and restart the GNOME session to see that Big Board knows that you are logged in Online Desktop).

I hope these instructions are complete, but if you find any problem or error please tell me and I’ll update this post. Moreover you can find some solutions for your problems at Jhbuild Issues.