In portal-normal.ftl I use top-head.jsp is it possible to replace it and use the custom page?
Yes, it is. In general, you can customize everything in Liferay.
However, this and your other question make me believe that you are going for the wrong solution to whatever problem you have. If you look at top_head.jsp, there is a lot of functionality made available on every page. Unless you're prepared to lose it all, you'll have to replace it with your own implementation.
In order to add something to top_head.jsp, you should use one of the two offered dynamic includes.
While a simple "yes" fully answers your question, it might be more productive to let us know about the underlying problem that you're intending to solve with this technique. I bet that there's a better solution for it, and especially one that is a lot easier to maintain.
Related
I have already done all the I18N and GetText things in multiple languages for an existing site.
For selecting one language or another it seems that prefixing urls with path parts like www.domain.com/fr_FR/my_action or www.domain.com/de_DE/my_action is the best way to go, gor Google friendly sites.
I have found this module: Catalyst-Plugin-I18N-PathPrefix And seems to be based on this advent article
Is it the right way (or current best practice) to do this in Catalyst?
It promises that I do not need to change my actions, my required arguments and urls.
Or this plugin/technique makes a overload in the server that I can better avoid rewriting all my urls by hand?
Regards:
Migue
Are www.domain.com/fr_FR/my_action and www.domain.com/de_DE/my_action the same resource, just represented in
different languages? Or would your users see different contents depending on the language they choose (like, I don't know, different news)?
If the answer to the first question is yes I'd rather go for implementing Accept-language header compliance, for example using I18N::AcceptLanguage, which has the additional benefit that it won't interfere in any way with how you designed your URLs.
I take the risks and implemented the Catalyst-Plugin-I18N-PathPrefix plugin. It was easy, and the server load (that was my main concern) seems to be unnoticeable.
Lets say... I should use time to optimize a lot of things of my own code before be concerned about the plugin performance.
Thank you, anyway.
I would like to add a comments section to our postings. Our websites are based on Java and Wicket framework. I searched for some ideas to realize a comments system but couldn't find any kind of approriate solution.
Maybe someone knows about a solution. Maybe there are other possiblities.
Tanks for answering, but this question is outdated!
Well you can easily write this on your own. just a view database tables for holding and managing the thread and its comments. Let the editing be done through tinymce as said an display the content as you whish. There are a view Repeaters to list a Collection of any kind holding some DAOs to iterate. For what kind of speacial features exactly are you looking for, that might be to difficult to develop them on your own? If you want to keep it simple, this would be all you need.
I have been using an Object-Oriented MVC architecture for a web project, and all the models are OO Perl. But I have noticed a couple on the team are reverting to procedural techniques and are essentially using "objects" as dumping grounds for related functions. Their functions basically read/write directly to/from the database.
What's the best way to convince them this is the wrong way? Are there some good tutorials I can get them to read?
I can think of three possible reasons why some team members may not produce nice OO code:
They don't care
They care, try to do it right but lack skills to do it right
They are doing it right, or at least right enough! Some matters of design are matters of opinion. Go back and look at some of your own old code, code that you thought was quite good, there's a good chance that you would revise some of it now.
My approach is to make the assumption that everybody wants to do the job right, so I assume (or pretend to assume) that folks care. One tries to build an ethos of wanting to do it right.
So that leaves building our skills, theirs and yours (and mine). Code reviews seem like one obvious way to do this. Talk about alternatives. Also maybe pair-programming?
OOP is just a tool to accomplish some great things like more reliable, usable and maintainable software. If you can not convince your team to write tests give up with strict OOP.
Are they all out of step with you? Perhaps it's just you who is out of step!
Lest I seem facetious, I mean what are the answers to the following questions:
What has the team agreed should be the approach?
Whose responsibility is it to enforce purity? If you don't go for enforced purity, whose responsibility is it to encourage purity? If it's not you, have a look in the mirror and make sure you are not the annoying noob on the team telling the old sweats how to do the jobs they've been doing since you were in Perl baby-clothes.
What mechanisms do you have in place for sorting out such team issues? Regular code reviews, pair programming, bare-knuckle fights ?
Asking them to read some tutorials is likely to be a waste of breath. What are your arguments for doing things the OO way? As Boris has observed, OO is not an end in itself, it is only a means to an end, and not the only means.
There are probably more things you want to consider in your situation, but these should get you started.
i have a big web application running in perl CGI. It's running ok, it's well written, but as it was done in the past, all the html are defined hardcoded in the CGI calls, so as you could imagine, it's hard to mantain, improve and etc. So now i would like to start to add some templating and integrate with a framework (catalyst or CGI::application). My question is: Somebody here has an experience like that? There is any things that i must pay attention for? I'm aware that with both frameworks i can run native CGI scripts, so it's good because i can run both (CGI native ad "frameworked" code) together without any trauma. Any tips?
Write tests first (for example with Test::WWW::Mechanize). Then when you change things you always know if something breaks, and what it is that breaks.
Then extract HTML into templates, and commonly used subs into modules. After that it's a piece of cake to switch to a framework.
In general, go step by step so that you always have a working application.
Extricate the HTML from the processing logic in the CGI script. Identify all code that affects the HTML output, as these are candidates for becoming template variables. Separate that into a HTML file, with the identified parts marked with template variables. Eventually you will be able to refactor the page such that all processing is done at the start of the code and the HTML template just called up at the end of all processing.
In this kind of situation, rewriting from scratch basically, the old code is useful for A) testing, and B) design details. Ideally you'd make a set of tests, for all the basic functionality that you want to replicate, or at least tests that parse the final result pages so you can see the new code is returning the same information for the same inputs.
Design details within the code might be useless, depending on how much the framework handles automatically. If you have a good set of tests, and a straightforward conversion works well, you're done. If the behavior of the new doesn't match the old, you probably need to dig deeper into the "why?" and that'll probably be something odd looking, that doesn't make sense at first glance.
One thing to remember to do first is, find out if anyone has made something similar in the framework you're using. You could save yourself a LOT of time and money.
Here is how I did it using Python instead of Perl, but that should not matter:
Separated out HTML and code into distinct files. I used a template engine for that.
Created functions from the code which rendered a template with a set of parameters.
Organized the functions (which I termed views, inspired by Django) in a sensible way. (Admin views, User views, etc.) The views all follow the same calling convention!
Refactored out the database and request stuff so that the views would only contain view specific code (read: Handling GET, POST requests, etc. but nothing low-level!). Relied heavily on existing libraries for that.
I am here at the moment. :-) The next obvious step is of course:
Write a dispatcher which maps URLs to your views. This will also lead to nicer URLs and nicer 404- and error handling of course.
One of the assumptions that frameworks make is that the urls map to the code. For example in a framework you'll often see the following:
http://app.com/docs/list
http://app.com/docs/view/123
Usually though the old CGI scripts don't work like that, you're more likely to have something like:
http://app.com/docs.cgi?action=view&id=123
To take advantage of the framework you may well need to change all the urls. Whether you can do this, and how you keep old links working, may well form a large part of your decision.
Also frameworks provide support for some sort of ORM (object relational mapper) which abstracts the database calls and lets you only deal with objects. For Catalyst this is usually DBIx::Class. You should evaluate what the cost of switching to this will be.
You'll probably find that you want to do a complete rewrite, with the old code as a reference platform. This may be much less work than you expect. However start with a few toy sites to get a feel for whichever framework/orm/template you decide to go with.
Does anyone know of a good code obsfucator for Perl? I'm being ask to look into the option of obsfucating code before releasing it to a client. I know obsfucated code can still be reverse engineered, but that's not our main concern.
Some clients are making small changes to the source code that we give them and it's giving us nightmares when something goes wrong and we have to fix it, or when we release a patch that doesn't work with what they've changed. So the intention is just to make it so that it's difficult for them to make their own changes to the code(they're not supposed to be doing that anyway).
I've been down this road before and it's an absolute nightmare when you have to work on "obfuscated" code because it drives up costs tremendously trying to debug a problem on the client's server when you, the developer, can't read the code. You wind up with "deobfuscators", copying the "real code" to the client's server or any of a number of other issues which just become a real hassle to maintain.
I understand where you're coming from, but it sounds like management has a problem and they're looking to you to implement a chosen solution rather than figuring out what the correct solution is.
In this case, it sounds like it's really a licensing or contractual issue. Let 'em have the code open source, but make it a part of the license that any changes they submit have to come back to you and be approved. When you push out patches, check the md5 sums of all code and if it doesn't match what's expected, they're in license violation and will be charged accordingly (and it should be a far, far higher rate). (I remember one company which let us have the code open source, but made it clear that if we changed anything, we've "bought" the code for $25,000 and they were no longer responsible for any bug fixes or upgrades unless we bought a new license).
Don't. Just don't.
Write it into the contract (or revise the contract if you have to), that you are not responsible for changes they make to the software. If they're f-ing up your code and then expecting you to fix it, you have client problems that aren't going to be solved by obfuscating the code. And if you obfuscate it and they encounter an actual problem, good luck in getting them to accurately report line number, etc., in the bug report.
Please don't do that. If you don't want people to alter your Perl code then put it under an appropriate licence and enforce that licence. If people change your code when you licence says that they shouldn't do that, then it's not your problem when your updates not longer work with their installation.
See perlfaq3's answer to "How Can I hide the source for my Perl programs? for more details.
It would seem your main issue is clients modifying code which then makes it difficult for you to support it. I would suggest you ask for checksums (md5,sha, etc) of their files when they come to you for support, and similarly check files' checksums when patching. For example, you can ask the client to provide the output of a provided program which goes through their install and checksums all the files.
Ultimately they have the code, so they can do whatever they want to it. The best you can do is enforce your licenses and to make sure you only support unmodified code.
In this case obfuscating is the wrong approach.
When you release the code to the client you should keep a copy of the code you send them (either on disk or preferably in your version control as a tag/branch).
Then if your client makes changes you can compare the code they have to the code you sent them and easily spot the changes. After all if they feel the need to make changes there is a problem somewhere and you should fix it in the master codebase.
Another alternative for converting your program into a binary is the free PAR-Packer tool on CPAN. There are even filters for code obfuscation, though as others have said, that's possibly more trouble than it's worth.
I agree with the previous suggestions.
However if you really want to, you can look into PAR and/or Filter::Crypto CPAN modules. You can also use them together.
I used the latter (Filter::Crypto) as a really lightweight form of "protection" when we were shipping our product on optical media. It doesn't "protect" you, but it will stop 90% of the people that want to modify your source files.
This isn't a serious suggestion, however take a look at Acme::Buffy.
It will at least brighten your day!
An alternative to obfuscation is converting your script to a binary using something like ActiveState's Perl Dev Kit.
I am running a Windows O/S and use perl2exe from IndigoSTAR. The resulting .EXE file will be unlikely to be changed on-site.
As others have said, "how do I obfuscate it" is the wrong question. "How do I stop the customer from changing the code" is the right one.
The checksum and contract ideas are good for preventing the "problems" you describe, but if the cost to you is the difficulty of rolling-out upgrades and bug-fixes, how are your clients making changes that don't pass the comprehensive test suite? If they are capable of making these changes (or at least, making a change which expresses what they want the code to do), why not simply make it easy/automated for them to open a support ticket and upload the patch? The customer is always right about what the customer wants (they might not have a clue how to do it "the right way", but that's why they are paying you.)
A better reason to want an obfuscator would be for mass-market desktop deployment where you don't have every customer on a standing contract. In that case, something like PAR -- anything which packs the encryption/obfuscation logic into a compiled binary is the way to go.
As several folks have already said: don't.
It's pretty much implicit, given the nature of the Perl interpreter, that anything you do to obfuscate the Perl must be undoable before Perl gets its hands on it, which means you need to leave the de-obfuscation script/binary lying around where the interpreter (and thus your customer) can find it :)
Fix the real problem: checksums and/or a suitably worded license. And support staff trained to say 'you changed it? we're invoking clause 34b of our license, and that'll be $X,000 before we touch it'....
Also, read why-should-i-use-obfuscation for a more general answer.
I would just invite them into my SVN tree on their own branch so they can provide changes and I can see them and integrate their changes into my development tree.
Don't fight it, embrace it.
As Ovid says, it's a contractual, social problem. If they change the code, they invalidate the warranty. Charge them a lot to fix that, but at the same time, give them a channel where they can suggest changes. Also, look at what they want to change and make that part of the configuration if you can. They have something they want to do, and until you satisfy that, they are going to keep trying to get around you.
In Mastering Perl, I talk a bit about defeating obfucators. Even if you do things like making nonsense variables names and the like, modules such as B::Deparse and B::Deobfuscate, along with Perl tools such as Perl::Tidy, make it pretty easy for the knowledgable and motivated person to get your source. You don't have to worry about the unknowledgable and unmotivated so much because they don't know what to do with the code anyway.
When I talk to managers about this, we go through the normal cost benefit analysis. There is all sorts of stuff you could do, but not much of it costs less than the benefit you get.
Good luck,
Another not serious suggestion is to use Acme::Bleach, it will make your code very clean ;-)