Roxen Application Launcher 1.2.1

There’s a new release of Roxen Application Launcher (come again?) for Linux.

Although the previous release, using GTK3, came quite recently this release has some new things.

GSettings

I dumped the “keyfile” solution for the application settings in favour to GSettings. So the settings is no longer stored in a file in the application directory but rather in the system’s application settings backend. GSettings is part of GIO – the GNOME networking library – and since RAL depends on GIO no new dependency is needed. The upside is that I could put a file of source code in the bin! Plus, it’s fun learning new stuff!

Editors and content types

Previously I have kept an editor – name and command line – for every content type. Anders at Roxen thought it’d be better if editors and content types were separated. I’ve thought about that before but never bothered to do anything about it.

But now, along with GTK3, there’s a new (I think) AppInfo class and the new AppChooserButton and AppChooserDialog widgets so I thought it’d be cool to use those. So selecting an editor for a new content type is way more simple now, and it also looks nicer. Plus we get the icon for the editor in the content type list under the “Applications” tab ;)

Simple logging

I also implemented some simple logging which can be viewed under the new “Logging” tab. This will be worked upon and at the moment not very useful information is written to the log, but at least it’s a start.

Default icons

The icons in the notification popup – which only are three to the number – is now fetched from the user’s default icon theme. They we’re bundled before.

SOUP all the way

Previously I have used a little hack for saving downloaded files to disk. The problem was that the Vapi bindings for libsoup casted the data to a string which totally scrambled binary content like images and such. My solution was to write a simple C-function which took a SoupMessageBody struct as argument and then wrote that to diskt always keeping the uint8[] type of the content.

I bug reported this way back and it’s now fixed in Vala so I dumped my solution and am now using Vala all the way. Gone is one C and one Vapi file.

While at it I changed from using blocking functions in libsoup to the async ones. You never really noticed blocking calls was used before, but right is right. Right?

And that’s that for this time I think!

Roxen Application Launcher 1.2.1

Sources is available at the Roxen Application Launcher Github repository

Roxen Application Launcher 1.1

There’s a new release of Roxen Application Launcher (come again?) for Linux.

I have updated the application launcher to use GTK3 so that it builds on Ubuntu 11.10 and any other Linux distribution using GTK3. This also made it possible to drop the dependency for libunique since Gtk.Application can handle single instance applications.

I also fixed a bug which made it impossible to use the appliction launcher on sites not running on port 80 or 443.

So there’s no new features in this release.

Roxen Application Launcher 1.1

Sources is available at the Roxen Application Launcher Github repository

Roxen Application Launcher 1.0.10

This is not the latest version of Roxen Application Launcher. You’ll find the latest version at the download page.

There’s a new release of Roxen Application Launcher (come again?) for Linux.

No big news, but the GTK+ tree view of files is now sortable. The “minimize to tray” function is now actually invoked when the window is minimized rather than closed. A right click in the file list now also let you go the the file’s directory in the Sitebuilder.

Also fixed a bug where the locales didn’t get installed correctly and also fixed a bug which scrambled the configuration file a bit.

Roxen Application Launcher 1.0.10

Sources is available at the Roxen Application Launcher Github repository

Roxen Application Launcher 1.0.3

This is not the latest version of Roxen Application Launcher. You’ll find the latest version at the download page.

 

In this release of Roxen Application Launcher (come again?) for Linux I’ve gotten rid of a few dependencies, namely: gconf, libgee and libgnome. The reason I dumped gconf and libgnome was to make it easier to install in KDE. I’ve verified it installs in KDE, although I noticed the translation doesn’t work and the Roxen SVG logo doesn’t show up in the window top border.

Roxen Application Launcher in KDE

Libgee is a collections API written in Vala and since I used a newer version than what is available in most package managers, and I’m not sure all Linux distros provide libgee, I decided to dump it and implement the same functionality with the generic collection classes in Vala. And since the collections used in RAL is quite simple that worked out just fine.

I have also tried to implement bundled download, which is only used in Roxen Editorial Portal. Since I don’t have access to such an installation I haven’t been able to verify it works as expected. I re-implemented the same behavior as in the launcher written in Pike by the Roxen guys.

Oh, and if you already have an installation of my RAL your previously downloaded files and settings will not be available to the new install. Since I dumped gconf I now store the settings in a plain text file and I have put the RAL application directory in ~/.conf/roxenlauncher since ~/.conf is where you should put application specific data according to freedesktop.org. In previous versions of RAL I stored application data in ~/.roxenlauncher so if you want your previously downloaded files copy ~/.roxenlauncher/files to ~/.conf/roxenlauncher/files.

The sources is available at Github.

Roxen Appliction Launcher 1.0.3 00:43, Fri 24 September 2010 :: 384.8 kB

Roxen Application Launcher 1.0

This is not the latest version of Roxen Application Launcher. You’ll find the latest version at the download page.

 

So I had a go at the Roxen Application Launcher (come again?) for Linux. I added a context menu – when you right click – to the file list. When you right click a file in the list you get the option to view that file in the Sitebuilder, edit it or remove it.

Other than that there’s nothing new. And since the application seems to be very stable I decided to bump the version number to 1.0.

The sources is available at Github.

Roxen Appliction Launcher 1.0 00:06, Sun 12 September 2010 :: 376.2 kB

Pingly – a Roxen module for automatic Twingly pinging

Twingly is a blog search engine that focus on indexing the “blogosphere” rather than being a generic search engine. Twingly has a ping service that let you ping Twingly when you have new content on your blog so that Twingly can head over there and index the new content asap.

Since Roxen CMS have event hooks this module listens for newly published files and when found automatically notifies Twingly about it.

The only thing needed is to set up a config file in the SiteBuilder’s workarea so that this module knows under which paths newly published content should notify Twingly and with which arguments. But all this is documented in the module.

One note! If you run a replicated environment install this module on one of the frontend servers, not the backend. If installed on a backend Twingly might head over to your site before the new content has been replicated.

The Pingly Roxen module 11:32, Fri 09 July 2010 :: 15.4 kB

Roxen Application Launcher 0.4.5

This is not the latest version of Roxen Application Launcher. You’ll find the latest version at the download page.

Screenshot of Roxen Application Launcher

Okey, here comes an update of my Roxen Application Launcher (come again?) for Linux.

There’s no major changes to this release. The connection to the Roxen server is now stored in a shared object so that it can use a “keep-alive” connection. Not that I think it matters a great deal.

There’s now an option to change the behavior of the applications window close button so that it hides the application to the tray – or notification area as it’s called in Gnome – rather than closes the application.

More Vala programming to the people – Sources at Github.

Roxen Appliction Launcher 0.4.5 23:00, Tue 13 April 2010 :: 375.9 kB

Roxen Application Launcher 0.4.4

This is not the latest version of Roxen Application Launcher. You’ll find the latest version at the download page.

So, here’s a new release of the Roxen Application Launcher for Linux (RAL). The previous versions used my home made (sloppy so) HTTP client which didn’t handle redirects or secure connections – thank you tec for the feed back – since I had some major problems getting libsoup working with binary files like images and such. Binary files was heavily scrambled when read from or written to disk so I made my own simple HTTP client that kept the data as a byte array to prevent some underlying libraries (GLib) from fiddling with it.

But I solved the libsoup issue so now the RAL handles redirects and secure connections. This is how I solved it:

The libsoup issue

When uploading a file back to the Roxen server I use IOChannel (g_io_channel in plain C) instead of Gio. So the upload works like this:

13 lines of Vala
  1. var sess = new Soup.SessionSync();
  2. var mess = new Soup.Message(“PUT”, get_uri());
  3. mess.request_headers.append(“Cookie”, get_cookie());
  4. mess.request_headers.append(“Translate”, “f”);
  6. IOChannel ch = new IOChannel.file(local_file, “r”);
  7. ch.set_encoding(null); // Enables reading of binary data
  8. string data;
  9. size_t len;
  10. ch.read_to_end(out data, out len);
  12. mess.request_body.append(Soup.MemoryUse.COPY, data, len);
  13. sess.send_message(mess);

And that seems to work like a charm!

When downloading data it’s a bit more tricky! Of course I tried using IOChannel in this case also but that made no difference. Downloaded images ended up 4 bytes long! But then I thought: You can make your own C bindings in Vala (remember the Vala compiler generates C code) through what is called Vapi files. So what I did was writing a C function that takes a SoupMessageBody object/struct passed from Vala and writes the data part to a file given as argument.

19 lines of C/C++
  1. gboolean save_soup_data(SoupMessageBody *data, const char *file)
  2. {
  3. FILE *fh;
  5. if ((fh = fopen(file, “w”)) == NULL) {
  6. fprintf(stderr, “Unable to open file \”%s\” for writing!\n”, file);
  7. return FALSE;
  8. }
  10. int wrote = fwrite(data–>data, 1, data–>length, fh);
  12. if (wrote != (int)data–>length) {
  13. fprintf(stderr, “wrote (%d) != data->length (%d). Data may have been “
  14. “truncated”, wrote, (int)data–>length);
  15. }
  17. fclose(fh);
  18. return TRUE;
  19. }

And this was then made available to Vala by the following Vapi file:

6 lines of Vala
  1. [CCode (cprefix = “”, lower_case_cprefix = “”, cheader_filename = “”)]
  2. namespace Soppa // Soppa is Swedish for Soup 😉
  3. {
  4. [CCode (cname = “save_soup_data”)]
  5. public bool save_soup_data(Soup.MessageBody data, string file);
  6. }

And this is how the actual Vala code downloading the files looks like:

15 lines of Vala
  1. var sess = new Soup.SessionSync();
  2. var mess = new Soup.Message(“GET”, get_uri());
  3. mess.request_headers.append(“Cookie”, get_cookie());
  4. mess.request_headers.append(“Translate”, “f”);
  5. sess.send_message(mess);
  7. if (mess.status_code == Soup.KnownStatusCode.OK) {
  8. // Here I call the C function made available through the Vapi file
  9. if (Soppa.save_soup_data(mess.response_body, local_file)) {
  10. message(“The file was downloaded and written to disk OK”);
  11. }
  12. else {
  13. message(“Failed writing data to disk!”);
  14. }
  15. }

So that’s that on that! ;)

The notification

I also – just for fun – implemented a notification mechanism through libnotify. Since I believe that can be rather annoying it’s not activated by default but can easily be activated by a checkbox in the user interface.

The packages

The Roxen Application Launcher for Linux can be downloaded at the download page at Github where also the work in progress sources is available or downloaded below!

Roxen Application Launcher 0.4.4 23:06, Wed 13 January 2010 :: 373.5 kB

Stay black!

New Roxen Application Launcher for Linux written in Vala

This is not the latest version of Roxen Application Launcher. You’ll find the latest version at the download page.

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon a fairly new programming language named Vala. I thought it looked promising and since Vala is developed by the GNOME project – with the purpose of making software development for, primarily, GNOME easier – and I’m an avid GNOME user I wanted to look deeper into the world of Vala.

I, and most programmers I believe, work in that way that I need a real and useful project when learning a new programming language. So I thought why not re-writing the Roxen Application Launcher I wrote in C#/Mono a couple of years ago in Vala – which by the way is syntactically very, very similar to C# and Java. I’d gotten tired of always having to fiddle with the C# code with every new version of Mono since something always broke when Mono was updated so a re-write wasn’t going to be totally pointless. The good thing about Vala is that the Vala compiler generates C code and that’s what you compile the program from. Fast code and hopefully more mature and stable libraries that won’t break backwards compatibility with every new release.

What about Vala

So, on I went about it and I think that Vala is a really promising language. It’s still a very young language so some library bindings isn’t behaving exactly as expected and the documentation isn’t directly redundant – although the Vala reference documentation site isn’t half bad. But since Vala pretty much is a wrapper for, or binding to, the underlying C libraries you can find answers to your questions that way. All in all I think Vala has a promising future: Way more simple than C and almost as fast and light on memory (remember the Vala compiler generates C code) and way faster than C#/Mono and free from any Microsoft associations ;) .

What about the Roxen Application Launcher

In this new version I utilize GConf for storing application settings. I also made use of – for the first time – the GNU Build Tools for compilation which also makes it easier to distribute and for others to compile from the sources. This also means that the distributed version compiles from the C sources and not the Vala sources so there’s no need for the Vala compiler to build the program.

Other than that there’s nothing fancy about it. The Vala sources is available at my Github repository.

Roxen Appliction Launcher 0.4.2 19:38, Sun 20 December 2009 :: 374 kB

Screenshots

The screenshots is showing the Swedish translation.

List of downloaded files
Screenshot 1 of the Roxen Application Launcher

Adding support for new file type
Screenshot 2 of the Roxen Application Launcher

The GNOME status icon
Screenshot 3 of the Roxen Application Launcher

Gravatar module for Roxen

Although I’m working on some social web related Pike modules where a Gravatar module is included I needed a Gravatar module right now at work so I hacked up a standalone Gravatar Roxen module.

This is how it works

12 lines of RoXen Macro Language
  1. <ul>
  2. <emit source=“sql” host=“mydb”
  3. query=“SELECT name, email, `date`, body FROM my_comments”
  4. >
  5. <li>
  6. <gravatar-img email=“&_.email;” rating=“pg” size=“32”
  7. default-image=“/path/to/icon.png”
  8. /> &_.name; wrote at <date iso-time=“&_.date;” />
  9. <wash-html paragraphify=“”>&_.body;</wash-html>
  10. </li>
  11. </emit>
  12. </ul>

Download the Gravatar Roxen module 14:20, Wed 09 December 2009 :: 7 kB