the info barn

If your work involves embedding QuickTime movie files into web-pages then beware; we have found that there are some pitfalls! Support for the two tags EMBED and OBJECT seems to vary from browser to browser. IE gives priority to the OBJECT tag, FireFox to EMBED. Not only this, but Apple seems to give precedence
to the EMBED tag for many of its proprietry parameters.

All of this means you need to be careful when generating HTML pages on-the-fly using JavaScript. We found that the only way to support both browsers was to rely on the EMBED tag and, in fact, not to use the OBJECT tag at all. For static content this does not seem to be a problem, but if you wish to change parameters such as href or src it does.

The Flash plugin from Macromedia has been around for some time and a great way to enhance the internet experience for end users. We’ve been looking at one of the newer features which comes with FlashMX, namely Flash Remoting. Flash Remoting utilises an internal protocol called AMF (Action Message Format) to transfer information efficiently between the client (Flash inside your browser) and the server (a gateway installed on the remote server). Web applications that feel more like desktop ones become possible with this technology!

To create the Flash movie you need the Macromedia editing environment, but when it comes to the server side there are several choices. The easiest option is to install Cold Fusion MX. This includes a Remoting Gateway and is easy to use, but not everyone wants Cold Fusion on their webserver. We have also experimented with FlashORB, but we found it rather more difficult to set up. For .NET users, though, it is probably the best solution. Finally we have tried a Perl module: FLAP, an open source solution which we like as it allows full application of all the great tools and methods that Perl provides. Here’s a demonstration we’ve created using Flash and FLAP!

When faced with the problem of publishing a large store of metadata describing a library of video clips, the obvious answer for us was to develop an XML based system. We designed an RDBMS to store the data in Access, with forms to enter, navigate and export to XML. The client interface we developed uses W3C DOM standard tree navigation and node set methods and works in the major web browsers which support this, providing a drill-down-by-filter type of experience.

With these tools, our system allows data entry, storage, export to removable media and platform independent searching; in our case used for publishing a video clip library to removable hard disk.

We’ve been tinkering with Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). This rather under-used XML based graphics format is ideal for publishing map data on the web. With the included scripting capabilities some neat effects can be achieved - like this map with selectable countries.

In our view, many websites could vastly improve their usability simply by including this kind of interactivity. It would be great if the next generation of browsers natively supported this format! - in the meantime, download Adobes plugin: www.adobe.com.

We’ve just completed a publishing job which required reading 3B2 version 8 source and outputing Folio flat file format. If you don’t have a support contract from Advent3B2 it is hard to find information about the 3B2 format. If you are like me and prefer diving into some code rather than reading documentation this script from Andrew J Rixon is a really useful starting point.
Coincidentally both Advent3B2 and Folio have recently been purchased. Advent3B2 is now part of Arbortext and the publishing part of NextPage (NXT 4, LivePublish and Folio) is now owned by Fast Search & Transfer. NextPage 1.5, now in beta testing, is the non publishing side of NextPage and is an innovative solution for collaborative editing of office documents - one to watch.

What do you do when you need to constantly monitor your clients’ websites conveniently? Simple! You write a little Perl-TK (Perl with windows graphics capability) utility and have it running on your desktop all the time. At a glance you can see when the last check was done, and ours alerts everyone on your local Windows domain when a check fails.

Handy.

Nick

Emacs, that great editor from the GNU guys. If you are programming in multiple languages, like me, Emacs is certainly your friend. I couldn’t manage without the extensive keyboard shortcuts and ability to seamlessly switch to different edit modes right there in the middle of programming. Maybe one the best uses for this is is writing an ASP page, where I might want to view my code in Perl mode one minute, HTML mode the next, and JavaScript a moment later! I love the regular expression search and replace too.

Nick

The standard Internet explorer installation comes with various DOM classes and APIs that can be used to work with XML and XHTML locally and over HTTP. We have adapted some of our ASP pages on the UniRom website to use these objects to display this blog and our technology areas from del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/).

There were some issues adapting the code to work with basic authentication in a PerlScript page We used the Msxml2.XMLHTTP class to fetch the content and MSXML2.FreeThreadedDOMDocument to load and parse the XML.

Nick

This is UniRom’s first blog entry. The info barn covers matters that we are interested in or just want to comment on.

Nick