The Loop

I just stumbled accross this article – the subject matter certainly puts questions over the sanity of the author, but, never the less it is actually quite a good example (or tutorial if you can go that far) of how to use Smart Objects within Photoshop.

This is just a quick note; my apologies for the lack of posting lately – its not that I haven’t had anything to write about, quite the opposite… but right now im preparing for a server upgrade and I have already ported the blog data, so yes, Im being a bit lazy, but we should be all ported to the new servers in a couple of weeks.

So bear with me guys, Cheers

If you havent seen it already, then where the hell have you been? iPhone 3G is comming out July 11th, and, yes, like all the other Apple disciples I shall be venturing down to my local store to get one. Sweet mother of god, just look at it…. its got GPS and everything…

I’ve recently started using Amazon EC2 and put quite simply, it could well be the best computing platform the world has ever seen! Its flexible, scalable, and very competitively priced which makes it an attractive proposition for users that are currently on fixed priced virtual machine hosting.

The real differentiator with EC2 is that you are effectively building a linux machine from scratch that can be flug around there cloud to any location. So, that means you could make an image of your running machine using there AMI Tools and have your box running in East Coast America. Pretty straight forward so far. You then get wind (pun intended) that a massive hurricane is about to hit the East Coast, and you’d feel safer if your servers were far far away, right? No problem, with a simple one line command you can re-deploy the image to the West Coast cloud and everything would just pick up where it left off! Amazing!

On top of all that clever trickery, you get pretty decent control over firewall ACL’s and the choice of box configuration is pretty decent – the ‘small’ machine still has 1.7GB of RAM, which is a boat load more than most of VM’s on the market. You can even get 7.5GB and 15GB variants.

Amazon, you have out-done yourselves. Congratulations!

As a number of you are aware, I have spent quite a bit of time wrestling with XMPie uProduce SOAP API with the CXF service framework in Java. I finally (and with quite a lot of disappointment on my part) gave up trying to get that to work. CXF just does not want to play nice and I cant seem to make the XJB bindings work correctly with it and the mish-mash WSDL coming from uProduce

Anyway… with that rant over, I tried to be objective and switched to using Metro – ok, out of the box I still had a whole heap of problems, exactly as I did with CXF. However, I have managed to wangle it!

Step 1

You will need access to an XMPie server with the API’s installed and working. For the sake of this example i just wget’d the WSDL file so the generation code was not so bloated.

Step 2

You’ll need an XSD XJB binding file which looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<bindings xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/jaxb" 
          xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" 
          xmlns:xjc="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/jaxb/xjc" 
          version="2.0">

  <globalBindings>
    <xjc:simple />
  </globalBindings>

  <bindings scd="~xsd:complexType">
    <class name="ComplexTypeType"/>
  </bindings>

  <bindings scd="~xsd:simpleType">
    <class name="SimpleTypeType"/>
  </bindings>

  <bindings scd="~xsd:group">
    <class name="GroupType"/>
  </bindings>

  <bindings scd="~xsd:attributeGroup">
    <class name="AttributeGroupType"/>
  </bindings>

  <bindings scd="~xsd:element">
    <class name="ElementType"/>
  </bindings>

  <bindings scd="~xsd:attribute">
    <class name="attributeType"/>
  </bindings>
</bindings>

Save this as xsd.xjb (or whatever you like, just make sure the name is reflected in the command below)

Step 3

Actually generate the code! Your command might look different, but heres mine:

  wsimport -b http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema.xsd \
    -b src/xjb/xsd.xjb \
    -keep \
    -s src/java \
    -d target \
    -p com.xmpie.wsapi.icp \
    src/wsdl/InteractiveCampaign_SSP.wsdl

You should then see something like the following in your finder (or other OS file browser if not on mac):

These are the class files created for the InteractiveCampaign WSDL – all 128 of them!

Anyway, I have run out of time for today, but will try and get another blog up soon about how to use this in a client application from a java CLI.

Whilst at Drupa I was lucky enough to get a back room showing of what Creo will be releasing in Q4 of 2008 and into 2009.

The first impressions are really great – the native UI (Cocoa on OSX and .NET windowing on WinTel) means that no matter what your platform you get widgets that you are familiar with and work seamlessly with the operating system. That really is quite a differentiator when compared to competing products, and one that I am sure a lot of people would welcome as even from personal experience, quite a number of other solutions are using SWNG, or, god forbid, AWT in Java which are clunky and just not up to the modern users expectations.

Plugins

One of the things that really is very good about Darwin is the plugin system they have devised. Whilst I currently have no information on what inner complexities one might face with implementing your own plugin, the architecture I was shown looked very open, and very friendly – which is a massive plus point in my eyes.

Performance

Darwin was awesomely quick too – speed and beauty in the same package! Eliot Harper has blogged some very nice performance testing between XMPie uDirect and Creo Darwin which can be found here

Integration

Creo have changed the way in which the Darwin working environment is persisted – its now a separate DVJ file. This means that when working with InSite, the system can automagically create the darwin files for you. I’d go out on a limb and say that if InSite is able to create those files, then any other system you might want to write would also be able to generate DVJ files – this could really create some interesting options for mash-up style workflows!

What About The Cons?

Ok, so all products have there cons – thats life – at the moment Darwin only supports flat file data-sources. Perhaps that will change over time, but we’ll see I guess. Release is quite some time off so who knows what those guys might come up with!

Kudos Creo , this really is great work.

Another interesting article about Darwin and InSite can be found here

This post is a bit off of the usual code focused articles I write, but having just arrived back from Drupa I feel that I just need to write a quick post about this as I really did think it was awesome!

The product in question is 3D Systems ProJet

No word of a lie, this machine can “print” 3D models of things via an InkJet process – it really is amazing the fine, granular control they have over how it works its magic. Like I said, very off topic, but freaking awesome at the same time!!