eXo Platform 4: History of our Platform Designs

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This is a copy of a Blog Post I first wrote here : http://blog.exoplatform.com/2013/04/23/exo-platform-4-history-of-our-platform-designs

When people ask me if I’m satisfied about what I’ve done, my answer is usually: « There’s still room to improve this and that, I don’t like this, I want to do this next, this could be better, and so on. »

I’m the « never satisfied » type of guy. Thus, working for eXo Platform fits me well, because as soon as we release a new version, we’re already working on the next one and thinking about new challenges (stay hungry, stay foolish, we could say).

That said, I can also appreciate great accomplishments. And today, I want to talk about one in particular: the overall design of eXo Platform 4. That may sound partisan coming from an eXo employee, but keep in mind I wasn’t involved in the design process—we have a Brand & Design team for that. So the first time I saw Photoshop mockups of what would become Platform 4, I was very excited but I also wondered how this would be rendered in dynamic applications.

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Document Management Add-on Faster than Ever

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This is a copy of a Blog Post I first wrote here : http://blog.exoplatform.com/2013/04/03/document-management-add-on-faster-than-ever

Wouldn’t it be cool to see updates from other users in real time (or near to real time)? No browser refresh, nothing to do: they would just appear all by themselves.

A few months ago, I published an initial post about the Documents Add-on; you can read it here Developing a Simple Document Management eXo Add-on.

Since then, I have added a lot of new features:

  • Support for Microsoft Office and Open Office documents (requested by the community)
  • Folder support (requested by the community)
  • Internationalization: English and French translations
  • Bookmark compliant
  • Design updated for Retina displays
  • Auto refresh
  • Local storage

In the video bellow, I will focus on the last two but you will be able to get a preview of some of the others as well.

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Tip of the Day : MD5 checksum to avoid refresh

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That may seem obvious but I did this in one my js call to avoid unnecessary refresh in the client application

$.ajax({
url: jzChatWhoIsOnline
},
dataType: 'html',
success: function(response){
var tmpMD5 = calcMD5(response);
if (tmpMD5 !== whoIsOnlineMD5) {
whoIsOnlineMD5 = tmpMD5;
// REST OF THE CODE HERE
}
});

Pretty Damn Simple and it works like a charm :-)

Juzu Day 3: The Coolness

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This is a copy of a Blog Post I first wrote here : http://blog.exoplatform.com/2013/01/24/juzu-day-3-the-coolness

Today is the last of my three days on Juzu and I want to show some nice features you can find inside.

If you want to start from Day 1, you can take a look in the previous posts:
- Three Days with Juzu: Write a Killer App;
- Juzu Day 2: Real Web Apps as well.

So, if you want to see some nice gems, it’s here.

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Juzu Day 2: Real Web Apps as Well

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This is a copy of a Blog Post I first wrote here : http://blog.exoplatform.com/2013/01/23/juzu-day-2-web-apps

Today, we will delve more deeply into Juzu Web Framework. We will see the differences between the Portlet and Servlet modes.

If you didn’t read part one, you can start by looking at: Three Days with Juzu: Write a Killer App.

So, let’s start with the fundamentals !

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Three Days with Juzu: Write a Killer App

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This is a copy of a Blog Post I first wrote here : http://blog.exoplatform.com/2013/01/22/three-days-with-juzu-write-a-killer-app

One of the reasons I love working for eXo Platform is the chance to work with some very talented people. Julien Viet is one of them. So when he said to me last year that he was finally designing a new web framework, I was very excited and impatient to get my hands on it.

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Chat in the Cloud with MongoHQ

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This is a copy of a Blog Post I first wrote here : http://blog.exoplatform.com/2012/12/20/chat-in-the-cloud-with-mongohq

Going back in time, I published a blog post about a new eXo Add-On: eXo Community Chat.
You can read more about it here: eXo Platform Add-ons: Chat in Space

As I promised some technical posts about the technology I used, I wrote a first post about MongoDB: Chat Application: Why MongoDB?

Now, it’s time to see all the coolness of MongoDB inside an eXo app. We will see in this post how easy it is to switch to a Cloud storage using MongoHQ service and what are the impacts for your app.

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Chat Application: Why MongoDB?

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This is a copy of a Blog Post I first wrote here : http://blog.exoplatform.com/2012/12/18/chat-application-why-mongodb

A few days ago, I published a blog post about a new eXo Add-On: eXo Community Chat.

You can read more about it here : eXo Platform Add-ons: Chat in Space

In that post, I promised some technical insights about the technology I used. So, here they are.

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eXo Platform Add-Ons: Chat in Space

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This is a copy of a Blog Post I wrote here : http://blog.exoplatform.com/2012/12/11/exo-platform-add-ons-chat-in-space

You may think I refer to the Red Bull Stratos event: Felix Baumgartner will do the same stratospheric jump and will chat with the Red Bull team at the same time. Well, that would be fun but it’s not what I meant. It would also be hard to type on a keyboard while wearing a space suit, don’t you think?

So, I will talk about Chat in the eXo ecosystem. The first thing to know about the eXo Platform is that it’s all about Collaboration and Social communication within your company. It allows you to create your own social network, and people can then create what we call Spaces to work together, by sharing events, documents… you name it.

Now, if I want a discussion among my Space members, I don’t want to use another tool, I want to quickly ask my questions and to have a real-time answer. That’s exactly the scenario I wanted to address with my add-on.

Let’s get started!

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