So, I use GitHub as my main source code repository, but I set up a second repository on the server I want to deploy to, normally in my home directory. First create an empty Git repo:

$ git init --bar ~/git/my-repo.git

To trigger a deployment on a push, we define a post-receive hook in this new repository. Hooks allow the you took invoke behaviour on a variety of git events, in this case we are interested in when the repository has successfully received a push.

$ vi ~/git/my-repo.git/hooks/post-receive

This is just an example, but the contents of the post-receive hook might look like this for a rack/passenger based web application:

#!/bin/bash

cd /var/ww/my-site
unset GIT_DIR
GIT_WORK_TREE=/var/ww/my-site git pull
GIT_WORK_TREE=/var/ww/my-site git reset --hard
GIT_WORK_TREE=/var/ww/my-site git submodule update -i
bundle install
touch tmp/restart.txt

Of course, this file can contain whatever you want, just make sure you set the executable bit on the file:

$ chmod +x ~/git/my-repo.git/hooks/post-receive

All that remains is to push your local repository to the new git repo on your server:

$ git remote add prod ray@my-server.com:~/git/my-repo.git
$ git push prod master

This is just a simple example, but because you are executing a script on the server, you can basically perform any functionality you like. I don’t know whether this would be a good idea in a large-scale production environment, but the key here is to make the deployments as simple and easy as possible to encourage smaller and more regular changes. Backing it with git enables a basic form of rollback, but anything that is not controlled by git, i.e. database schema state, will still need to be managed separately.

The source is available on github, but it is available to install from ruby forge by using the command:

$ gem install xcoder

A simple use-case would be to find the only project in a directory, update the project’s build number and then invoke a build:

# Find the first project in the current directory
project = Xcode.find_projects.first

# Find the target called "TargetName"
target = project.target(:TargetName)

# Find the configuration called "Debug"
config = config.config(:Debug)

# Update the build number
config.info_plist do |info|
    info.version = ENV['BUILD_NUMBER']
    info.save
end

# Clean the build for this target's configuration 
config.clean

# Build the target using this configuration
config.build

# Create an IPA for this target's configuration signed using the provided identity and embed the provided profile
config.package :sign => 'iPhone Distribution: Developer Name, :profile => 'Provisioning/ProfileToEmbed.mobileprovision'

It’s early days yet, but I plan on adding support for OCUnit => JUnit output mapping (like the xcode-hudson-plugin) as well as loading provisioning profiles from the file system and generally manipulating the project file. Please send issues/feature requests to the Xcoder page on github

In order to encapsulate the observation, a new instance of an object that implements the callback method signature is created for each observation and passed back to the caller. It is expected that this object is retained by the caller until the caller wants the observation to end. I’m not totally convinced that this is the best pattern, but it is at least concise and uses the existing language semantics. So, on to a simple example:

As you can see, this is very terse and means that all the code to react to changing properties can be encapsulated in the one place. The returned value is being set to a retained property so that the binding does not get dealloc’d. This observation will remain in effect until you release the returned object by setting the property to nil (as in the example) or, indeed, set the property to any other binding.

I would be very interested in feedback about whether this works for you.

I followed the post’s suggestions and updated my availability date and suddenly the app was marked as “Pending Contract”. However, all my apps are currently freebies and so there are no contracts in place, nor should there be. I filled out as much of them as I could (bar registering for GST), but to no avail.

I seem to be at the whim of Apple’s famously distant customer service right now.

Update: I eventually solved this by releasing a new version of the app, the process seemed to fix the existing app as it immediately reappeared in the app store while the new version was awaiting approval. Go figure!

I also found a very slick library called three.js which I used to create the header animation on rayh.com.au. It provides a basic set of 3d concepts such as points, lines, renderer, camera, etc which can use to draw and animate basic 3d scenes. There is no special loop function, you just use setInterval to trigger your animation to update every once in a while.

Biting the bullet, I decided that I needed some sort of server-side scripting. By day, I mainly use Java and sometimes Ruby. So my choices seemed to be Java, Ruby or PHP. Many moons ago, I was a PHP developer and I bailed out of that technology in favour Java. For me, PHP just sucks in far too many areas for me to adopt it for a one-off tiny website, but the reasons why is another story. Java seems way to heavyweight and verbose for my needs and so Ruby seemed like the natural choice.

Previously I had used Rails for projects, but it’s full-stack solution was still too much for my needs as my site has no database access. This led me to look at Sinatra, a super lightweight and declarative approach to a web application. I simply converted my existing html file to a .erb and told Sinatra:

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'

get '/' do 
  erb :index
end

This code is pretty much all that is needed to get up and running. It tells Sinatra that when a user accesses the root of the site using GET, serve the index.erb file from the views/ directory. This approach allowed me to just add the features I needed to perform the simple set of requirements I had rather than trying to convince Rails to do less.

When it came to deploying the app, I used Passenger (AKA mod_rails) with apache which was an absolute breeze. I highly recommend this approach if you need something more powerful than simple javascript & html without resorting to full-stack web application frameworks or ugly php scripts embedded in html.

For example, imagine you have a series of filters, all of which may, or may not, add constraints or expressions to your query. Each filter will need to append it’s own SQL to the end of any previously generated SQL and may even need to introspect the existing SQL to determine if its doubling up on statements or resolve potential conflicts.

With Criteria this becomes simpler. For example:

criteria = Criteria.new
criteria.and do |c|
  c.or User.role.eq(:admin)
  c.or User.active.eq(false)
  c.or User.createdAt.gt(10.hours.ago)
end
criteria.and do |c|
  c.or User.role.eq(:editor)
  c.or User.active.eq(true)
  c.or do |c2|
    c2.and User.createdAt.gt(20.days.ago)
    c2.and User.createdAt.lt(10.hours.ago)
  end
end
users = User.find(:all, criteria)

We could, at any point, introspect the state of criteria by calling:

criteria.ands.each do |c|
  put "AND #{c}"
end
criteria.ors.each do |c|
  put "OR #{c}"
end

And, finally, we can remove arbitrary bits of criteria:

criteria.ands.delete_at 2

I hope to have a release out very soon, but for the time being some more examples and API docs are on the Criteria project page on RubyForge

trigger on (new Button) { button.putClientProperty("Quaqua.Button.style", "placard"); }

The above code allows me to inform the underlying Quaqua LookAndFeel that I wish to use the placard button style. If I wanted to use this selectively, I would have to subclass Button.fx, provide an additional attribute (say style) and then apply the property if the attribute is set.

Obviously, you need to know the internal name for the Swing component you are trying to access, this API documentation is pretty helpful for that.

First, download and unzip the Ecipse + J2EE package from http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/. You do not need to ‘install’ Eclipse as such, just put the uncompressed directory somewhere logical (/Applications on a Mac, for example).

1. Launch Eclipse
2. Select: Help -> Software Update -> Final and Install.
3. Select Search for new features to install
4. Check the Europa Discovery Service
5. Select Add Remote Site

1. Type in name: Aptana (For javascript support)
2. Type in url: http://update.aptana.com/install/3.2/
3. Select OK

Phew, so after all that, you should have an Eclipse IDE set up to support PHP, Ruby, Rails, Javascript, Java, Hibernate and Subversion. You can, of course, select many other tools from the Europa discovery site for other development tools, graphical editing and the like.

It would be nice to have a small js library that allowed you to dynamically instantiate and destroy embedded, hidden applets.

Basically, you can annotate your classes with url’s describing the RDF namespace of the class or property. You can then use SPARQL to query/retrieve the beans, and serialize them to/from XML. Serialization can be acheived through the Sesame framework.

Elmo User Guide

Additionally, there is another project, JRDF, that builds upon Sesame and Jena. I have yet to use it, but sounds like in encompasses the best of all worlds.

Using this, we created an applet with no UI, that sits in a 0×0 pixel container, and a javascript support library which communicates and wraps the functionality provided by robonobo. All the UI can now be rendered using html, css and javascript, in a very ajaxian fashion.

There are a couple of gotchas though:

• You cannot return primitive types such as int, float, etc. Instead you must use the object equivilents Integer, Float, etc.
• Calling from javascript comes from an unprivileged thread, so despite your applet’s policy, it may well be denied permissions. You can simply wrap such requests on the java-side with an AccessController.doPrivileged()
• Large applets can lock up the browser because the JVM and the jar are being loaded concurrently. This can be aleviated by splitting your applet into a smaller jar containing just the applet and interfaces, and the main jar containing the implementation. This way, the jvm and applet initialize quickly, and then do not block the browser when the second jar is downloaded.

Then, you need a Push-to-talk voip system. Often you dont need to have a full conversation with someone, but instead let them know what your doing, or that you have just updated a document, etc. A special key on the keyboard (maybe caps lock? put it to some good use) will enable you to say a few words to a person or to the whole team.

Two things immediately struck me: 1) lack of a common templating system and 2) lack of a common authentication /authorisation system

Now, I don’t mean that there should be a single templating system used by all, but there should at least be support for a simple border template system. Such a system could let me define the basic outline, css, scripts, divs, etc and then nominate extention points, i.e. places in the template other systems can hook into and publish their content. HTML with some proprietry xml tags embedded could be transformed using XSLT into the project specific template format. Indeed, drivers could be provided to allow converstion to most popular templating systems.

Templating is a big issue with me, everyone has their own way of doing it. I do not agree with systems like Smarty that try to seperate the user from the structures of php in order to prevent them from embedding control logic in their templates. Of course, a developer shouldn’t be doing this, but this is a self-discipline issue, not a need to develop a non-standard scripting language on top of another, perfectly functional, scripting language.

The templating issue was overcome, if in a rather hacked manner, by reducing the templates of each project to the bare minimum, ie, no css, simple div structures, etc. A proxy-like service would then explode the head and body section and recombine it using a standard template. This could be seem as object-like inheritance of a standard template dom tree (similar to the concept of XUL overlays).

Although templating is an irritating issue, it is not quite as irritating as the authentication issue. Here we have three seperate projects, each with their own authentication system, and although some allow the easy application of your own code, quite why the community cannot make efforts to agree on a common authentication API, is beyond me.

PHP needs to be distributed with a set of APIs that cover these common problem areas. Additionally, if you want to include code from several projects into one, you NEED some form of namespacing standard. I would love to see some sort of PHP community standards effort that would lay down the law for such things. Projects built to these specifications would automagically behave well together and allow coders to get on with writing Cool Shit rather than hacking a project’s ludircrously over-complex templating system.

This is a bit of a hack, but its probably the simplest way of passing structured data. What would be nice is a bit of code that would automagically serialize a bean to JSON notation… I’m sure there are many out there (This apache struts class looks promising)

These pages are rather helpful: Mozilla’s guide to using proxies and XulPlanet’s description of the nsIProxyObjectManager

This interface defines a proxy manager. An instance of this manager is used to create a proxy for a particular object on which you wish to invoke a method. If you are calling from any other thread that which you initialized xpcom on, you will need to do this, and as far as I am aware, there is no trivial way of doing otherwise.

Anyway, the code to open a new window would be as follows. Note, this method assumes that there is already a constructed object called windowWatcher, which is an instanceof nsIWindowWatcher, see previous post for details.

 public void openWindow(String chromeUri, String name) {
nsIEventQueueService eventQueueServive =
(nsIEventQueueService)serviceManager.getServiceByContractID(
"@mozilla.org/event-queue-service;1",
nsIEventQueueService.NS_IEVENTQUEUESERVICE_IID);

nsIEventQueue eventQueue = eventQueueServive.getSpecialEventQueue(
nsIEventQueueService.UI_THREAD_EVENT_QUEUE);

nsIProxyObjectManager proxy =
(nsIProxyObjectManager)componentManager.createInstanceByContractID(
"@mozilla.org/xpcomproxy;1",
null,
nsIProxyObjectManager.NS_IPROXYOBJECTMANAGER_IID);

nsIWindowWatcher windowProxy =
(nsIWindowWatcher)proxy.getProxyForObject(
eventQueue,
windowWatcher.NS_IWINDOWWATCHER_IID,
windowWatcher,
nsIProxyObjectManager.INVOKE_SYNC );

windowProxy.openWindow(null, chromeUri, name, "centerscreen", null);
} 

The code here uses the service manager to get an instance of the event queue manager, which is subsequently used to retreive the main UI event queue. This is then passed to the proxy manager’s getProxyForObject method, along with the IID of the nsIWindowWatcher interface, the actual instance, and flag representing the type of proxy operation (async, sync, etc, see the xulplanet page for more info).

This method returns an instance of nsIWindowWatcher, which is actually a proxy which will inject events onto the UI thread for you. Then, just use the object as normal, sweet!

We decided a while back to adopt an XML based protocol wherever possible, and moreover, RDF where appropriate. When communicating with a central server, this would use HTTP, so it seemed logical to use the same on the localhost. So, XUL uses AJAX, basically, to do asynchronous calls over HTTP to localhost, and retreives XML which is then passed into objects representing the returned resources. This way, we dont need to heavily integrate Java and XUL using XPCOM, and we allow other applications to be able to place nicely with the API over a well-known protocol and format. Anyway, this means that the only work JavaXPCOM needs to do is:

• Start XPCOM using a XULRunner installation
• Start an XUL window and pass control over to it
• Be able to call javascript/xul events from java (to open windows, etc)

So to start with, we need to find an XULRunner install. As it stands, we will distribute a version with the installer, but JavaXPCOM contains code to easily find installed versions as well (this is actually documented on the JavaXPCOM site).

1. Set the path the XULRunner directory, here we are doing it explicitly: File grePath = new File(new File(".").getAbsolutePath(), "platform/win32/xulrunner");
2. Next create an instance of the LocationProvider LocationProvider locProvider = new LocationProvider(grePath);
3. Initialize JavaXPCOM embedding: Mozilla.getInstance().initEmbedding(grePath, grePath, locProvider);
4. Now we need to start an XUL application, so we get an instance of the XPCOM service manager nsIServiceManager serviceManager = moz.getServiceManager();
5. Now we need to get the @mozilla.org/toolkit/app-startup;1 service: nsIAppStartup appStartup = (nsIAppStartup)serviceManager.getServiceByContractID("@mozilla.org/toolkit/app-startup;1", nsIAppStartup.NS_IAPPSTARTUP_IID);
6. Get the nsIWindowWatcher interface to the above nsIWindowCreator windowCreator = (nsIWindowCreator)appStartup.queryInterface(nsIWindowCreator.NS_IWINDOWCREATOR_IID);
7. Get the window watcher service nsIWindowWatcher windowWatcher = (nsIWindowWatcher)serviceManager.getServiceByContractID("@mozilla.org/embedcomp/window-watcher;1", nsIWindowWatcher.NS_IWINDOWWATCHER_IID);
8. Set the window creator (from step 6) windowWatcher.setWindowCreator(windowCreator);
9. Create the root XUL window: nsIDOMWindow win = windowWatcher.openWindow(null, "chrome://your-app/content/window.xul", "mywindow", "chrome,resizable,centerscreen", null);
10. Set this as the active window windowWatcher.setActiveWindow(win);
11. Hand over the application to xpcom/xul, this will block: appStartup.run();

Now, the LocationProvider is responsible for providing path(s) and file(s) that XPCOM needs. I have implemented a version that when the ‘ChromeML’ location is asked for returns an array of File’s, the first of which points to my own applications chrome folder, and the second of which is the xulrunner’s own chrome folder. This seems to work, but there are several issues:

1. I do not seem to be able to open XUL windows (or in anyway interact with xpcom/xul) from another thread. Since this run() method on nsIAppStartup blocks, this is a bit annoying. I presume there is a way to run this loop manually, or hook into it so we can queue up requests from other threads to be invoked on the xpcom thread.

Ok, thats only one major issue for now, but I’m sure I will think of others. If anyone has any ideas how these problems can be solved, or how one may circumvent them, I’m all ears. Also, I know that this area is so bleeding edge it hurts, so it would be nice to talk to some other people doing the same things!

http://xullicious.blogspot.com/2005/06/xul-music.html  is an example of how to make a cross platform media player using gstreamer and directx for the application, and XUL for the front end.

Zap! is a XUL based SIP (ie, VoIP) client for mozilla.  Basically a cross-platform streaming audio tool using the PortAudio audio library.

First, is the streaming audio library, DirectX is used on windows, but since this is quite well abstracted, it could be rewritten on a per-platform basis, not the best solution, but it is doable.

Second, however, is the UI, System.Windows.Forms is an ugly beast, and not supported very well by either of the two open-source dotnet runtimes, so a choice needs to be made.

After looking at WX.NET, a .NET implmentation of WX widgets, and GTK#, GTK+ bindings for .NET, I was begining to get dishartened by the hackish way they were all implemented. GTK# is just ugly on all platforms, rather than looking good on one or two. WX uses the native interface, but there are no decent, free/cheap, tools to help you, the ones that do are so clunky, they make me worried as to how the rest of the system is imlpemented. All in all, very underwhelming.

Anyway, I am now looking at XUL and its damn nice, clean, standards complient, cross platform and open-source. The XUL Runner is a standalone application for running XUL apps, which would be packaged into the apps installer, and then the XUL part can communicate with the ‘real’ application over SOAP, XML RPC, or whatever, enforcing a strict seperation of UI and Application. Stuff like localization is done through entities defined in DTDs, and styling is done through css, very very cool.

This is the tutorial I followed.

Its quite interesting that the marketing world is begining to pick up on this, I for one would quite like an RSS feed from ticketmaster, say, complete with community tagging, so i could just get a feed of stuff I’m interested, based on my current location. The transition from being an irritating, ever-present, lowest-common-denominator-targeted, to useful, informative, open and transparent will make the early adopting marketing firms very very rich, they just need to become the first point of contact for such things.

No doubt, this will be Google; “Tell us your events on google base, and people can search based on their current location!”… Oh wait, isn’t this already possible?