Thoughts Electrique

This is the continued report from the OpenCms Days 2009. If you haven’t read the first part you might as well read it first.

The second day started with the keynote of Joel Tosi and I think this was one of the best talks of the conference (although his question totally took me by surprise since I had had no coffee yet).
Joel took a very critical view on enterprise software and support claims and explained some of the benefits they get from OpenCms at the CME.
I especially liked that he presented very concrete information of implementation and business (numbers & figures)  and also think taking the seriousness out of some enterprise label was really good.I saw many people smiling knowingly throughout the whole presentation. You rarely have a talk which is informative and also entertaining.

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What often bugged me is that I can upload a set of files into OpenCms as a ZIP file but can not download a tree of files as such (without the use of the database export feature). I had hacked together this little JSP some time ago. It allows you to dynamically download a set of OpenCms resources as a ZIP file.

The JSP has no interface since I mainly use it for development. Simply create a JSP somewhere in the OpenCms VFS and then open the file via the browser. E.g.:

“http://workplace.com/system/createzip?source=/system/modules/foo&filename=foo-module.zip”

The source parameter specifies which directory to zip up and the filename parameter which filename to use for the generated file. You can only zip up resources with a total size of 10 megabytes. This is mainly to prevent OutOfMemory errors to happen. You can easily increase the size by altering the variable maxSourceSize to any value you need.

If you find any bugs or want to give feedback simply leave a comment or send me an email.

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Especially with the new JPA driver for OpenCms by Georgi Naplatanov the question of running OpenCms on Google App Engine came up quite often at the OpenCms Days 2009. I had the same Idea when I first heard of the Java support for App Engine and did some quick research on how to do this. The research showed that running OpenCms on Google App Engine would require a huge rewrite of some OpenCms core functionalities.

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After two days of information overflow the OpenCms days 2009 are finally over. I think they were a success and personally got a lot value out of them.

We had a small get together on Sunday evening with a nice diner and some Kölsch. I think it’s always nice to meet some people before the conference so you can already connect to some people. We stayed out rather long and I was back at the hotel around 3:00 AM, but it was a lot of fun. I had many interesting talks and met a lot of very nice people. If you’re thinking of attending the OpenCms Days 2010, I would really recommend to come on sunday evening so you don’t miss this event.

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Since I’m currently working on an OpenCms mutli site solution I was looking for a possibility to restrict the available templates of a site. I know this can be done via permissions but the manual implementation of this is rather painful. I’m currently in the process of extending the OpenCms security manager to take care of this but while doing this I found an (to me) unknown feature.

By usage of the property folders.available (you might have to define it first) on a template you can specify a list of comma seperated folders in which the template is available (in the dropdown).

Unfortunately this property works only on file level and can not be inherited via the folder hierarchy. Also it does not provide a secure solution since the template can always be set via the advanced property dialog.

But you never know when a feature could come in handy.