Author: Ianforrester

Miles dropped this in my email box last night.
Watched the demo, which seems interesting…
However trailblazer does look quite useful, the lucece searching is a nice touch.But I would prefer it to generate xlinks (or even rdf) with thumbnails.As it could make for some very rich data while researching around. Also I bet Google and others would love to get there hands on such data.

Had a quick look at the range of very interesting opensource projects Novell are working on. Some great stuff, specially ifolder. Edd Dumbill has a huge review on his blog worth reading. Also mentions the nice looking F-Spot which seems to support FOAF depiction data. I dont know how it compares to my favourate photostudio which fully supports EXIF data. But we shall see…

How on earth do you setup a page to post over XMLRPC using the Apache XMLRPC classes?

Miles found me this page but I swear, I can not get it to work at all. Anyway I tried to adopt the blojsom admin edit plugin to fit the purpose but still cant get that working either. So I'm stuck now…

Been doing more research into the whole problem.
apache xml-rpc metaWeblog api

Miles solves it…
Variables needed for it work, title, description, category. Stick these in html form elements with a form method=”post”, action=”thexmlrpc.jsp” and submit button and your away. Oh dont forget the Apache XMLRPC classes.

<%@ page import="org.apache.xmlrpc.*,
                java.util.*"%>

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"? >

< !DOCTYPE html
     PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >

< html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en" >

< head >

    < title >Blogging using XMLRPC from a JSP based webclient< /title >

< /head >



<%
// Grab the variables from the form before.
String title = request.getParameter("title");
String description = request.getParameter("description");
String category = request.getParameter("category");
String blogServer = "http://something/blojsom/xmlrpc/blog";

// This is crap as we should really not use a hard-coded path
//String errorUrl = "http://a/url/that/you/post/from";
// Slightly less crap...
String errorUrl = request.getHeader("Referer");

Vector params=null;

if ((title == null) || (title.length() < 1)) {
    response.sendRedirect(response.encodeRedirectURL(errorUrl ));
    }
if ((description == null) || (description.length() < 1)) {
    response.sendRedirect(response.encodeRedirectURL( errorUrl ));
    }
if ((category == null) || (category.length() < 1)) {
    response.sendRedirect(response.encodeRedirectURL( errorUrl ));
    }

// Create XML RPC Client object
XmlRpcClient xmlrpc=new XmlRpcClient(blogServer);

Hashtable structContents=new Hashtable();
structContents.put("category", category);
structContents.put("title", title);
structContents.put("description", description);
Boolean Booly = new Boolean(true);

params=new Vector();
// Dummy for blojsom
params.add("1");
params.add("username");
params.add("password");
params.add(structContents);
// Publish this post
params.add(Booly);

String created = (String)xmlrpc.execute("metaWeblog.newPost",params);
out.println("< p >This is the result: " + created + ".< /p >");

out.println("< p >This is the title: " + title + ".< /p >");

out.println("< p >This is the description: " + description + ".< /p >");

out.println("< p >This is the category: " + category + ".< /p >");

%>

< /body >

< /html >

Still trying to get my head around Velocity and its amazing possibilites. Specially when considering joining velocity with cocoon. It shoud mean I can tap into some nice jar files for example reading icals, pdfs and images. Then turning them into some kind simple tree structure for cocoon to consume happly.

As most of my students keep on bugging about teaching PHP. I will kind of explain why VM or Velocity is the way forward and ever so different from JSP and PHP. Actually no need, its all done for me. Velocity Design. JSP vs VM, explains really well. Still cant find anything about L though. On the otherside its well worth checking out Java servlets, its the reason why I keep recommending Java servers to people. Resin, Jetty, Jboss and Tomcat in that order… Well worth reading the story behind Jboss, I dont agree with alot of it but its an interesting read anyway if quite long. Also come on guys theres a reason why Sun, IBM, Netscape, ATG, Apache, etc support Java servlets…