Magento is an e-commerce framework that is used as an online shopping cart. I am going to talk a little bit about Magento extensions and why they are useful when wanting to customize your shopping cart. Magento extensions allow you to change functionality of the shopping cart while modifying little to none of the source code. Since you do not have to touch the source code it gives you the ability to upgrade to newer versions and not lose the custom code. Another advantage of these extensions comes from Magento allowing you to run multiple websites from the same code base. Now that you are using the same source code for multiple websites these extensions allow you to have certain features for one website and different features of another website by simply having the extensions in your website’s directory. A good tutorial for creating an extension is provided by Magento.
Automating the Web with WWW::Mechanize
January 25th, 2010 by Joel Leyh No comments »And yes, the double colon does mean Perl. However, I know that Python also has the same class modeled after the Perl module. So even if py- is your favorite prefix, this should still be useful.
WWW::Mechanize gives you basic access to a “web browser” from your Perl scripts. It has the concept of getting, putting, ticking and clicking. Use an image map, or enter text into a text box. It even has a back button! Using all these and more, one can make quite the script to do most anything. I’ve used this before to create a script that logged into a Google Search Appliance and download a backup file. (Since for some reason, there is no way to push backups from within a GSA)
More recently, I decided to automate the downloading of PDF statements from my bank’s website. This is a popular use for WWW::Mechanize, and I’ll go through a quick script which will do just this.
» Read more: Automating the Web with WWW::Mechanize
Creating Services using SMF in OpenSolaris
January 22nd, 2010 by Paris Holley No comments »OpenSolaris has by far, one of the best service management interfaces that I have used. Below I am going to go over a simple way to turn in shell script into a service managed by the OS.
» Read more: Creating Services using SMF in OpenSolaris
Blue Monday
January 20th, 2010 by Mandy Smith No comments »January 25th is an important day… it’s not a holiday, it’s not a paid day off… it is…
The
L o n g e s t
and
most depressing
day of the year
Is trying to learn a new language every year worth it?
January 15th, 2010 by Aaron King 6 comments »While spending time recently looking for something new to learn that looked interesting, and it still being so close to new years, I was reminded of a bit of advice from the book “The Pragmatic Programmer,” learn a new language every year. But is learning a new language every year actually helpful?
» Read more: Is trying to learn a new language every year worth it?
Keep your dataTable clean with a custom popup
January 13th, 2010 by David Casleton No comments »The basic idea is to output some data to a user in a table and allow them to take an action on each row individually. A fairly straightforward solution is to create a separate page to link to, passing the necessary row information along. If the action is simple enough, like a single checkbox, you could just embed the necessary component(s) in each row of the table. Too many components, however, can bloat the table and make the UI cumbersome to the user. Instead we can create a popup window to overlay our page, containing whatever components are needed, and activate it by a link embedded in our table. Passing the row information is a little trickier, but the result is a cleaner interface and a better user experience.
» Read more: Keep your dataTable clean with a custom popup
Building Perl modules on OpenSolaris
January 11th, 2010 by Scott Peshak 1 comment »Anyone that’s worked with Perl is probably familiar with CPAN.pm. CPAN.pm is the bundled module that handles downloading and installing modules from the CPAN repository. It usually works flawlessly but I’ve noticed that on OpenSolaris the process can be a bit more spotty.
» Read more: Building Perl modules on OpenSolaris
Spring’s refreshable beans
January 8th, 2010 by Octavian Covalschi No comments »A couple of days ago I found out about a really nice feature in Spring, called ‘refreshable bean’.
Spring’s vision a refreshable bean is a dynamic-language-backed bean that monitors changes to its source code and then reloads itself when changes occur. And it is all this is done without restarting/re-deploying entire app. Sweet!
» Read more: Spring’s refreshable beans
Who Bound Port 8080
January 6th, 2010 by Jordan Nelson No comments »“Port 8080 required by Tomcat v6.0 Server at localhost is already in use. The server may already be running in another process, or a system process may be using the port. To start this server you will need to stop the other process or change the port number(s).”
I have been seeing this error from Tomcat every time I reboot my Windows development box.
» Read more: Who Bound Port 8080
