This is why I am excited about the series of articles Joe Zimmerman is doing for the ADC on implementing common design patterns in JavaScript. Not only does he manage to explain each pattern in easy to understand terms and describes common use cases, but he shows simple examples of how you would implement this pattern using JavaScript. In his most recent article, he covers the adapter, decorator and factory patterns, while his first article covered the singleton, composite and facade patterns. He also has many of these and more posted to his blog.

While you may not require each particular pattern immediately, they are always useful tools to have in your toolbox to use as needed. You also may rely on a framework which uses some of these patterns and understanding the underlying principles can be helpful in your proper use of the framework. Either way, I believe this series of articles (part 3 is coming soon) is well worth reading.

The Chat pod allows for completely open discussion among all participants and private discussion between two participants or a participant and a group (like the presenters). The Chat pod is unmoderated, which means anyone can post a question or comment and it will be seen immediately by everyone. Private chat appears in a separate tab in the chat pod.

The Q&A pod is similar in that anyone can post a question or comment to the pod, but unlike the chat pod, those posts are only seen by the presenters and hosts in a meeting. A presenter or host can choose to answer a question in the Q&A pod either publicly (in which case everyone will see the question and the answer) or privately (in which case only the questioner will see the question and answer). Questions from the Q&A pod can be assigned to a specific presenter.

So which pod should you use? Should you moderate your discussion or not? The answer of course depends on your web conference. As the host of a meeting, I usually ask myself a few questions when making this decision.

•  Is the goal to enable participants to ask me questions – or am I looking to facilitate a conversation between participants?
• How do I feel about participants chatting privately? Will this be a distraction to the meeting or will it increase engagement?
• Are there questions I might not be comfortable answering in public?
• How many participants are attending? What kind of meeting is it?

In general, I prefer to use an open, un-moderated chat pod. I find it can increase interaction among all participants. The un-moderated chat pod is ideal for collaborative meetings and often works well for virtual classrooms.

I believe it’s important not only use meeting size as the only factor – but as a meeting grows, it makes sense to swap out the un-moderated chat pod for a moderated Q&A pod. At this point, it also helps to have someone else in the meeting helping to moderate the Q&A pod while you speak. The Q&A pod is ideal for webinars.

Of course, you can have the best of both worlds. I’ll often use an open chat pod in my webinar lobby that participants can use while they’re waiting for a webinar to begin, then switch to a moderated Q&A pod during the webinar itself.

Tips & Tricks

• Encourage users to change the color of their text when using the chat pod. It helps to differentiate the questions and makes everything more readable.
• The presenter view of the Q&A pod can be sent to the Presenter Only Area (POA). This enables the presenters to work with a much larger pod while they are facilitating the questions.
• You can add multiple chat pods to a single layout. This is helpful when you want to solicit feedback across a number of different topics. Simply double-click the title of a chat pod to rename it.
• You can export a Q&A log of all of the questions that were asked as a rich text file. You can also email the content of any Q&A or chat pod. Click the pod options menu to access these options.
• You can use an un-moderated chat pod and still disable private chat. This can be quickly disabled in the Preferences dialog.

With over 1,700 attendees packing out the halls and pavilions in Battersea Park, seminars and workshops at every turn and an amazing line up of inspiring keynotes, the first day of Adobe’s Digital Marketing Summit 2012 was pretty hard to sum up – but we’ve given it a go…

A picture of the future of Digital Marketing

Kicking off the day, Adobe’s SVP Brad Rencher presented Adobe’s vision of the “Digital Self” – he examined the way that our digital signals, created by hundred of social actions, check ins, live streams and status updates, are creating a wealth of data that marketers can use to bring a deeply personal experience to customers.

“It’s not just about rows in spreadsheets but about real people who have real needs” – Brad Rencher, Adobe SVP Digital Marketing

Brad also spoke about the need for marketers to become more savvy when it comes to understanding this data. He emphasised that consumers are starting to wake up to personalisation and what it means for them, and in the future they will demand it. The message for marketers is clear: be prepared.

Privacy vs. personalisation

Among the many session streams on offer throughout the day, many were drawn to the fascinating discussion in the London 2012 room, chaired by the UK’s Digital Champion, Martha Lane Fox. Martha led a panel discussion, looking at the balancing act that consumers, regulators and marketers are all concerned about at the moment – that of personalisation and privacy.

Dave Evans from the Information Commissioners Office (ICO), who has been dealing with the recent EU ePrivacy Directive which will affect all websites using cookies from the end of May 2012. One hot topic of conversation was around how marketers will be affected by the changes, in particular how to know where the boundaries are between using customer data to help personalise experiences, without intruding into personal privacy, commenting on the issue Evans said,  “We need companies to test the limits of personalisation and privacy in order to move forward”.

Getting in a Huff about sleep and connectivity

The highlight of the day was a fascinating closing keynote from founder of the Huffington Post – Arriana Huffington. Since launching the “HuffPo” seven years ago, Arianna and her team have seen massive changes in the worlds of online journalism, blogging and user generated content – changes that they have been a major catalyst of, primarily through their open approach to allowing reader interaction and input across the site.

She spoke about the Huffington Post’s “nap” rooms – rooms on site at the website’s offices where employees can recharge. She herself is a big advocate for getting enough sleep and taking “digital retreats” where no technology is allowed – something which for many in the room was a challenging concept, we’re sure!

Keep track of all the #AdobeSummit news

The Summit has continued today and we will give you a full wrap up in tomorrow’s blog – for now, keep track of all the news, announcements, gossip and much more by following @AdobeSummit  and @AdobeUK on Twitter or track the #AdobeSummit tag for updates from attendees.

This functionality is useful in several scenarios; for example, when you’re moving assets from a development environment to a production environment.

Some important considerations to keep in mind:

• Only active assets can be exported. Further, all the assets to be exported must be on the same Correspondence Management system.
• For optimal performance, select a maximum of 100 letters for export and ensure that the exported ZIP package size does not exceed 50 MB.
• The export operation fails if one or more dependent assets for a selected asset are in the archived state. To resolve this issue, refer to the log and modify the selected asset such that it is dependent on the active version of the offending asset instead of the archived version.

You can access the documentation for this new feature here.

• Right now Creative Cloud membership (let’s call it “CCM”) is sold on an individual basis directly from Adobe & a couple of partners like Amazon & Staples. It’s not sold through volume licensing or reseller channel partners (e.g. B&H).
• There will be a way to buy CCM for groups of people, but it won’t be available until later this year.
• Once it’s available, I expect it to include everything that’s currently in CCM, plus added features for managing users, storage, & more.
• In the meantime, teams can buy what’s called “Creative Cloud Team Ready.” Team Ready includes the desktop apps that are part of CCM, as well as Adobe Expert Support, but it doesn’t include cloud features (such as Typekit access). It’s a term-license subscription, meaning that it ends at some point (by which time the CCM Team offering should be available).

Does that make sense? Please let us know you still have questions.

• Although the Shape Layer icon (badge) has changed, you can still double-click the shape layer icon to change the color of the shape’s fill.

• Because shapes are often very small in relation to the entire image, the Layers panel displays the contents of shape layers as large as possible in the Layer thumbnail – ignoring the relationship of the shape to the entire document (as other layers appear by default).

• Selecting a Shape layer in the Layers panel automatically displays the path in the image area (making it easier to quickly edit the shape).

• Command + H (Mac) | Control + H (Win) hides the path.

• Clicking on a shape in the image area with the Path Selection tool will automatically select that layer in the Layers panel.

• If you delete all of the paths on a shape layer, the layer will automaticallly be deleted.

“We’re excited to publish our leading brands to multiple channels using Digital Publishing Suite,” said Liz Schimel, Executive Vice President, Chief Digital Officer, at Meredith Corporation. “With our tablet editions, we’re looking forward to delivering content that entertains and delights our readers on these new devices – and that also drives additional revenue and subscriptions.”

Here at Adobe, we’re thrilled to work with such a strong and established leader in the media industry. Meredith Corporation produces iconic titles that provide compelling content to its customer base. Meredith features multiple well-known national brands in consumer interest areas such as home, family, health and wellness and self-development. These brands include Better Homes and Gardens, Parents, Allrecipes.com, Family Circle, Ladies’ Home Journal, Fitness, More, American Baby, FamilyFun and EveryDay with Rachael Ray.

The brands that will be produced for tablets include Better Homes and Gardens, Parents and Fitness.  Better Homes and Gardens first published in 1922, is the fourth best-selling publication in the United States with a print circulation of 7.6 million. Parents was first published in 1926 and has a print circulation of over 2 million. Collaborating with leaders in the media industry fuels innovative ideas in Digital Publishing Suite, and we look forward to a great partnership.

]]> Today is an exciting day for Digital Publishing Suite and Meredith Corporation. At the Adobe Digital Publishing event earlier today in New York City, Jim Guerard, Vice President and General Manager of Media Solutions at Adobe, announced that Meredith Corporation, a leading media and marketing company serving American women, has selected Digital Publishing Suite as its tablet publishing solution. You’ll soon see the iconic content from Better Homes and Gardens, Parents, and Fitness on tablet devices and featured in our Digital Publishing gallery.

“We’re excited to publish our leading brands to multiple channels using Digital Publishing Suite,” said Liz Schimel, Executive Vice President, Chief Digital Officer, at Meredith Corporation. “With our tablet editions, we’re looking forward to delivering content that entertains and delights our readers on these new devices – and that also drives additional revenue and subscriptions.”

Here at Adobe, we’re thrilled to work with such a strong and established leader in the media industry. Meredith Corporation produces iconic titles that provide compelling content to its customer base. Meredith features multiple well-known national brands in consumer interest areas such as home, family, health and wellness and self-development. These brands include Better Homes and Gardens, Parents, Allrecipes.com, Family Circle, Ladies’ Home Journal, Fitness, More, American Baby, FamilyFun and EveryDay with Rachael Ray.

The brands that will be produced for tablets include Better Homes and Gardens, Parents and Fitness.  Better Homes and Gardens first published in 1922, is the fourth best-selling publication in the United States with a print circulation of 7.6 million. Parents was first published in 1926 and has a print circulation of over 2 million. Collaborating with leaders in the media industry fuels innovative ideas in Digital Publishing Suite, and we look forward to a great partnership.

]]> http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalpublishing//comments/feed 0 http://blogs.adobe.com/livecyclepost/2012/05/xdp-stitiching-using-ddx http://blogs.adobe.com/livecyclepost/2012/05/xdp-stitiching-using-ddx#comments Tue, 15 May 2012 21:42:33 +0000 Girish Bedekar 32398 - Girish Bedekar, LiveCycle Solutions Evangelist @ Adobe

A common use case is to let the end user select various fragments to insert in the final PDF. The screen shot below would better explain what I mean by this. AS you can see this screen captures some user information, and allows the user to select fragments that need to be inserted in the final pdf. When the user hits the submit button it will call a LC process which will parse the parameters and build the DDX needed for XDP Stitching. The Process makes use of a custom component called xmlUtilities which allows you to insert elements in an xml document. The input parameters to the process are the name,city,address,state,zip and fragments. The fragments variable will hold a comma separated list of selected fragments.

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Read the complete post at Adobe LiveCycle Blogs.

Basically what I want to achieve is being able to run the following code unmodified in an OSGi bundle, and have the login() call access the set of JAAS authentication services that are currently available in the OSGi environment. I should be able to deploy and undeploy such authentication services without any changes to this code or the configuration of the containing bundle.

[sourcecode language="java"]
LoginContext context = new LoginContext(…);
context.login();
try {
…; // do something
} finally {
context.logout();
}
[/sourcecode]

So far the best thing I’ve found is the JAAS support that Guillaume Nodet described a few years ago. If I understand correctly, the relevant code lives in Apache Karaf nowadays, even though also Apache Felix mentions it and Guillaume’s original post refers to Apache ServiceMix. I’ve given up hope trying to identify which Maven dependency I should use to get this code.

However, the trouble I see with the ProxyLoginModule class, that seems like the core piece of glue in the Karaf JAAS support, is that it requires the login() call in the client code to explicitly pass the name of the bundle and the contained LoginModule class that are to be used for authentication. That breaks my expectation of zero code or configuration changes in the client bundle for adding or removing new authentication services. Also, it looks like only a single authentication service can be used at a time.

A more promising solution is described in a presentation that was apparently given by Stefan Vladov in the OSGi Community Event 2011. However, I couldn’t find any references to actual running code that implements that solution.

Please share any relevant pointers or other information in the comments below!