TypeScript for Alfresco and CMIS – Alfresco DevCon 2012 lightning talk slides and sample app

I also uploaded my slides to SlideShare from the second lightning talk presentation I made at Alfresco DevCon 2012 San Jose.

TypeScript for Alfresco and CMIS – Alfresco DevCon 2012 San Jose

This briefly covered some languages that can be translated to JavaScript (TypeScript, Dart, ActionScript, CoffeeScript) and used for developing HTML5/JS  desktop and mobile web applications. TypeScript seems to be the best choice. The IDEs and editors currently supporting TypeScript was then listed.

Finally, my plans to support various Alfresco and CMIS things with TypeScript was covered: port CMIS Spaces and FlexSpaces from Flex/AS3 to TypeScript, TypeScript wrappers for AlfJS and CMIS.JS, additional Alfresco and CMIS TypeScript libraries, sample showing a Share dashlet written in TypeScript, and a TypeScript definition file for intellisense / compile time type checking for Alfresco WebScripts.

The small TypeScript app (start on a repo browser) I started with definition wrappers for AlfJS, YUI3, with a dummy tree (no real data yet) and folder table (that displays data from Alfresco with AlfJS) is included here alf-yui-typescript-app1.zip (will add to github later). The definition for YUI3 comes from what this gist had with adds to get it to compile in Visual Studio 2012 with the TypeScript plugin.

Apache Stanbol Version of OpenCalais Integration – Alfresco DevCon 2012 lightning talk slides

I uploaded my slides to SlideShare from the first lightning talk presentation I made at Alfresco DevCon 2012 San Jose:

An Alfresco Apache Stanbol Integration (port of OpenCalais integration) – Alfresco DevCon 2012 San Jose

It covers the port of the OpenCalais Integration and its Share UI extension to work with Apache Stanbol. These integrations support auto-tagging, semantic tag clouds, and semantic geo-tagged maps. Both integrations are open source and available on Google Code .

FlexibleDashboard+Liferay: Collaborative BI dashboards managed in Liferay

FlexibleDashboard+Liferay

FlexibleDashboard+Liferay is an open source BI dashboard app / framework which supports dashboards layouts (user/group) managed in Liferay that can mix pure Flex FlexibleDashboard pods and regular Liferay portlets. This used to be called FlexibleLiferay when it was only a Flex portal container / Liferay front end app for portals with only regular Liferay portlets.

Placeholder “flexpod” portlets from the “FlexibleDashboard+Liferay” category can be added to a page/tab in the regular Liferay web UI, to configure BI dashboards. Then in the FlexibleDashboard+Liferay Flex/AIR app the appropriate FlexibleDashboard Flex pod will be displayed instead of a portlet. A Flex pod means its a pure Flex module being displayed without being wrapped in a portlet / HTML.

All these FlexibleDashboard Flex pods are supported: bar/line chart, pie chart, grid and grid/chart with Spring ActionScript config of BlazeDS data sources, BIRT report, JasperReports report, OLAP pivot grid / XMLA query tool, Pentaho charts, calendar, local files, and HTML.

Current limitations: pod.xml file configures on a portlet basis, would be better to have configurable properties on a portlet instance basis. Also module SWF files load from the Flex/AIR app dir, not from portlet web app dirs.

FlexibleShare updated

FlexibleShare extends FlexibleDashboard (dashboard framework, BI charting, reporting pods) with FlexSpaces doc management pods (Alfresco backend) and adds additional Flex pods for Share collaboration (Alfresco Share backend). All three of these projects are open source. FlexibleShare has been updated to use code from the latest versions of FlexSpaces and FlexibleDashboard, and the Share pods have added site selection drop downs.  Also added an  Alfresco Add-Ons page for FlexibleShare.

The doc management portion now has support for Alfresco 4.0, and a new preferences dialog for easier setup of server domain/port and API key setup of optional semantic auto-tagging with the OpenCalais Integration for Alfresco. The default config in the flexibleShareAirPods.xml just has the combined multi-view FlexSpaces pod shown in the top left. This screenshot also shows the available search, tasks, and local files pods (the all repository doc lib pod is not shown). In the AIR version, files from the local files pod can be copied into a doc lib view via drag/drop. Also in the AIR version, multi-select files can be copied via drag / drop from the desktop into a doc lib view,  copied out via drag/drop, or the native desktop clipboard can be used to copy/paste of files between the desktop and a doc lib   (AIR can do more than the HTML5 drag in available in some browers).

flexibleshareairbld4-33percent.png

The Share collaboration wiki, blog, discussions, doclib Flex pods are now more usable out of the box with added drop-downs to select Share site to work with (instead of setting the share site shortName in the pods xml file). More work is needed to hook up the calendar pod to load Share site calendar info (and an add event dialog is not available yet). Although the calendar pod is able to load iCalendar files, more work is needed to get it to work with the iCalendar data available from the Alfresco “slingshot” /calendar/eventList?site={shortName}&format=calendar webscript.

flexiblesharesharepods2.png

Planned for FlexibleShare:  calendar pod hookup with Share sites,   multiple repository support,  support for CMIS repositories, drag/drop copy between repositories, support for Alfresco Cloud repositories, multi-repository search,  Solr facets search navigation,  support for Apache Stanbol semantic auto-tagging / semantic search,  mobile/touch?, and a port/translation to HTML5 / CSS / JavaScript (FlexSpaces, CMIS Spaces, FlexibleDashboard, FlexibleShare).

Steve Reiner
Integrated Semantics
@stevereiner on twitter

FlexibleDashboard now has Mobile AIR support for iOS/iPads and Android Tablets

FlexibleDashboard, an open source dashboard project for BI dashboards/mashups, etc., now has a Flex Mobile AIR version in addition to Desktop (Desktop AIR and Flex in browser) versions. An Android build is available for download, and the iOS version can be built from the common source.

FlexibleDashboard used the esria dashboard as a starting point and evolved it with added flexmdi cascade/tile (esria pod drag/drop in tile mode), more pods, both Flex in Browser and Flex+AIR versions, port from Flex 3 to Flex 4,  and pods in separate Flex modules. Example pods using Spring ActionScript to have different configs for individual pods and config of a simple IDataService with either SOAP, XML, or RemoteObject BlazeDS datasources (see GridPod and ChartGridPod) were also added.

FlexibleDashboard has the following pods: esria charting pods with quietly scheming animation (line, bar, pie charts),  JasperReports viewer, BIRT Report viewer, OLAP pivotable grid with XMLA datasource support and MDX query editor (from Grebulon sourceforge project), Pentaho Charts sample, a simple BlazeDS data pod, Flex SWF pod, Calendar, HTML viewing (IFrame, AIR HTML, mobile StageWebView versions),  and some AIR only (Desktop and Mobile) pods (HTML browser, Google gadgets, Liferay portlet widget, and Local Files browser).

For mobile, only the bare minimum was done: pod min/max/close button hit areas was increased and mobile versions of pods displaying HTML were created (the snapshot feature of the flexcapacitor WebView Flex UIComponent StageWebView wrapper helped to support cascading mode html pods with only the topmost being in StageWebVeiw mode and the other being in bitmap snapshot mode.) Other pods were unchanged and don’t have mobile specific UI (but stuff still works, even  mx chart drill down with touch).  Also, the original app projects were split into separate app / library / modules projects to facilitate sharing with the new mobile app / library projects.

It took an error message on iOS about not being able to load module SWF (Duh!) to get me to change the mobile project to link pod code instead of loading modules. Android Mobile AIR was able to load modules, but mobile Flex app projects in Flash Builder doesn’t have module setup and won’t build the app using framework RSL even though its in the UI. So I ended up just having a single mobile app project for both iOS and Android that doesn’t use modules (desktop AIR and in-browser Flex app projects still use modules).

Plan in the future to have some sort of HTML5/JS Dashboard project like FlexibleDashboard   (with web app and PhoneGap mobile app variations).  Also plan to add support for semantic data sources / semantic data integration, and more visualization support.

Steve Reiner

Integrated Semantics

@stevereiner on Twitter