December 2007 Archives

One thing I'm going to try to do before going back to work on 2 January is get a Perl application released to the general public that Iodynamics was working on partly for a client and partly as a pet project. It's called FileStore and it's a mod_perl application for giving users Web-friendly access to files stored on a server.

The original inspiration for FileStore was Apache::FileManager which is still available via CPAN. Apache::FileManager was great... until Apache version 2 came out. I spent some time in the Apache::FileManager code to see how hard it would be to get it working under mod_perl version 2 and ended up wanting to cause bodily harm to Phillip Collins, its author.

I originally wrote Iodynamics::FileStore for internal use within our company several years ago. A handful of clients saw the benefit of using it to grant employees Web-access to Samba servers, but otherwise it was relegated to use only within our network. While it was a mod_perl handler, it relied heavily on Lincoln Stein's CGI.pm module for, well, everything. All the HTML was generated on the fly from CGI.pm calls. While that made for a compact self-contained application, it made it difficult to maintain and customize.

Another big weakness with Iodynamics::FileStore was that there was no built-in user authentication. It was typically deployed in a location configured for basic authentication with Apache. Once you made it past the basic username and password prompt, you had as many priviledges as anyone else- usually "777" permissions to the filesystem being served by the application.

So, in early 2007, I started redesigning the FileStore application thinking we could turn it into some sort of Web service people might actually pay for: An online, Web-based file server accessible from anywhere. Something like Alfresco, I guess, but without all the crap that gets in the way of being productive. (Can you tell I'm not too fond of Alfresco?)

Stephen Weeks and I took the original FileStore concept and added rudimentary role-based user authentication/authorization functions. We also created Template Toolkit templates to supplant all the CGI.pm presentation code. I worked with David Baker to design some simple icons for things like "Upload," "Copy," "Rename," and "Delete."

Then, Iodynamics went the way of the cuckoo.

A month or so ago, David Baker asked me about the FileStore project- wondering if he could use it for a personal project. I dusted off the code and installed it on his server and started thinking about releasing it for public consumption.

I'm ready to start doing just that. Eventually, I'd like to get Apache::FileStore in CPAN, but a lot of administrative work will need to be done on the project before that can happen. A minimal test suite will need to be written as well as documentation in POD format.

In the meantime, here's a screenshot. I'll make a tarball available soon.

Firefox 3 beta 2 came out this last week. After reading some of the press it has gotten, I decided to give it a try.

I went to the beta download page where there are several language options available for downloads built for Windows, Mac, and Linux. I selected the English (US) version for Linux and was given a bzip2-compressed tar file to download.

I would imagine a lot of less experienced Linux users would have no idea what to do with a tar.bz2 file as this is different than the way most common distributions package software (e.g. RPM files or DEB files.) I'll explain what I did to try Firefox 3 on my Linux system.

I downloaded the file to my /tmp directory. Then, I created a ff3 directory in my home directory:

shellprompt% mkdir ~/ff3

Then, I went into that directory and extracted the files.

shellprompt% cd ~/ff3
shellprompt% tar -xvjf /tmp/firefox-3.0b2.tar.bz2

At this point, I could run Firefox 3 by running ~/ff3/firefox/firefox, but I wanted something a little simpler, so I created a symbolic link in my ~/bin directory called ff3. Alternatively, you could use an alias command for this (e.g. 'alias ff3=$HOME/ff3/firefox/firefox').

shellprompt% cd ~/bin
shellprompt% ln -s ../ff3/firefox/firefox ff3

After that, I could run Firefox 3 by running the command ff3. I highly recommend you terminate any other Firefox processes (i.e. your distribution's Firefox 2 installation) so there's less possibility of the two fighting.

First impressions

It looks a little different, but not too much. All the familiar elements are still there. The first thing I noticed was the bookmark sidebar looked cleaner.

As I opened a few pages in different tabs, I noticed Firefox 3 does respond snappier than Firefox 2, confirming the reports that Firefox 3 employs much better memory management than previous versions.

Next, I checked out some of the cool features I'd read about, like the added functionality of the location bar.

This stuff is pretty dang cool! First of all, the location bar features a drop down button and an autocomplete feature just like it did before, but the drop-down list includes page titles and the autocompletion matches against titles as well! Again, the layout of this was markedly cleaner than similar features in Firefox 2 and the response was refreshingly snappy

Here's an image showing the new drop-down location bar list in action.

Next, an image showing the autocompletion matching against URLs and page titles. I typed ron p and several pages from my recent history were displayed in the location bar drop-down list. I'm not sure how they're ordered, though.

Another nifty feature of the Firefox 3 location bar is an even-easier way to bookmark pages with one click!. A small star icon is displayed at the right side of the location bar (next to the drop-down button). If the inside of the star is uncolored or white, the page is not bookmarked. If you click the star, the inside of the star becomes yellow and the page is bookmarked. Click the yellow star and a small popup appears allowing you to configure where the bookmark goes in your bookmark heirarchy. Very cool!

Here's a look at the unbookmarked location bar.

Below: The location bar after clicking on the star to bookmark the page.

Below: Clicking the "bookmarked" icon to activate the bookmark options dialog.

Another nifty new feature I discovered while preparing this post: When Firefox 3 displays a file upload form, simply clicking in the filename text box activates the file selection dialog. That's at least one less click!

I'll continue exploring this new beast and maybe report some more on what I find. So far, however, this is the most stable Firefox beta I've ever used and that's saying something.