Book Review for "Plone 3 Multimedia"

I've just finished "Plone 3 Multimedia", another Packt Plone title.

If you're not experienced with Plone, you probably need not pick this one up for a while. But if you are running Plone and want to use video, audio, photos, etc. to snazz it up-- there's a lot here for you. Here's the full review:


Plone 3 Multimedia

This is a book for Plone power users and administrators. The focus of the book is on multimedia capabilities, the content type is a wide-ranging survey with details for each of the many mini-subtopics. For anyone with a need to add multimedia content to a Plone site, I would recommend this book.

Chapter 1 is a brief chapter that defines Plone, ZCA (Zope Component Architecture), the excellent zc.buildout, and multimedia itself. The author gives us a brief introduction to Plone4Artists, which is an initiative that addresses many multimedia concerns.

Chapter 2 is all about images. The author tells us how to organize, resize, and group images in ways that make the site more appealing to the user. You are taught how to produce thumbnail images (which can be clicked into larger images) and how to use gallery/slideshow products. This is the first chapter to use a recurring theme: The author first explains the capabilities of a basic Plone installation, then later explains what sort of add-ons you might use to gain further capabilities. This is a meaty chapter with lots of technical content. If you're a serious Plone admin, this chapter alone might make the book worth your while.

Chapter 3 is the audio chapter. Audio formats are explained along with the advantages and disadvantages of the various types. A good explanation of audio metadata is included-- I found that part especially interesting. The author explains how to include audio players on your Plone site, and demonstrates writing a player view in HTML5. Like chapter 2, this chapter is a deeply technical one with plenty of specific advice to guide the reader.

It seems only natural that video content should follow audio and images, and so it is. Chapter 4 tells us how to stream and embed videos in your Plone site, also how to leverage videos hosted on external sites like YouTube. By now you'll recognize the familiar chapter format: First the basic capabilities of Plone are covered, then fancier alternatives are introduced including the Plone4Artists parts that address this chapter's needs. Once you recognize the chapter layout pattern, it really makes the material easier to divide into logical sections.

Chapter 5 concerns Flash in Plone. Several Flash helpers are covered, as well as some problem spots that can be avoided. As a special bonus, Silverlight is given coverage, too.

The next chapter was really interesting to me-- it was all about content organization and control. The first part dealt with categorization, and ways to optimize flexibility in Plone's folder-centric way of doing things. This was followed by a good discussion on content metadata, and an explanation of the Dublin Core standard for metadata. Tagging and rating of content followed this, and geo-location and the use of maps was the ending of chapter 6. There was enough information here that I am going to read it again!

Chapter 7 was all about Syndication, including RSS and Atom. As usual, the author outlined what a basic Plone installation can do, then suggests some add-ons that can further enhance your Plone site. Another common theme throughout the book is the suggestion of add-ons that will be helpful for the current problem set, then advice on how to configure the add-on for best usage.

Chapter 8 covers advanced uploading techniques. Say you have a whole photo album you'd like to move onto Plone, but you'd really rather not do it one file at a time. This chapter is for you, then! The author discusses FTP, WebDAV, and a few external tools that can be of use in this case.

The next chapter is all about persisting data. The author first covers the vanilla Plone default (ZODB, the object data base) then offers alternatives. The main concern is large binary files, which is natural since this book is all about multimedia data types. For these, Plone can be configured to use external sources (like YouTube) or file system mechanisms to hold the data outside of ZODB.

Chapter 10 is the final chapter of the book, and it covers the important topic of performance optimization. Varnish, the reverse proxy cache server is explained as is the Red5 video server. CachFu, a commonly used content caching mechanism, is also explained.

You might think 10 good technical chapters would be enough, but as they say on infomercials, that's not all! You also get not 1, not 2, but 3 appendices. Appendix A covers multimedia formats and licenses, including a nice explanation of various codecs you're likely to encounter. Appendix B is about Syndication formats, including RSS1, RSS2, and Atom. Appendix C covers links and places to find more information about Plone, it's build-out system, and more.

All things considered, this book is just what it purports to be-- an excellent resource for anyone using Plone to host multimedia content. There is enough diversity and depth in this book that I'm sure nearly everyone will learn something new (and many of us will learn many new things!) I would not recommend this book for a Plone newbie, as there is no gentle introduction preceding the technical content-- the author assumes the reader is already a reasonably competent Plone integrator. (This is all spelled out on the book's back cover and in the introductory text, though. If you miss that and come away disappointed, shame on you.) I'm sure this book will soon become a go-to reference for Plone lovers everywhere.

The book can be found here.

Happy Reading!

Free eBooks!

Hi all,

Once in a while, something really good comes along and you feel you just have to share it with people. That's what's going on today, I have some free eBooks to share.

Packt Publishing has recently decided to give away some of it's eBooks, free of charge. Here are at least 5 titles:

Building Online Communities with phpBB 2
Upgrading to Lotus Notes and Domino 7
Invision Power Board: A User Guide
Building Websites with e107
The PEAR Installer Manifesto

The link that told me about these give-aways is here.

Besides free eBooks, Packt is also converting their electronic books to the 'ePub' format, which promises superior display capabilities, flexibility in formatting, and a host of other benefits. There's a nice press release about it here.

I hope you find something good there.

Happy Reading!

P.S. If you don't want to follow the above link to the ePub announcement, I'll include the announcement as it reads on their site. Here it is:

by Julian Copes | July 2010 | Enterprise Articles Open Source
Packt Publishing announced today that its eBooks will be available to download from www.PacktPub.com in ePub format with immediate effect. Following feedback from customers, the fast-growing publisher made the move to provide this popular format and expects it to be well received.

ePub (short for electronic publication) is a free and open eBook standard by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). ePub allows greater flexibility with content. With an ePub-formatted book, the display of text can be optimized for the reader's device. Other ePub features include improved design and layout, Inline raster and vector images, better search functionality, while enabling DRM protection and embedded metadata.

The company’s marketing manager Damian Carvill said “Packt listens to all feedback from customers and attempts to act on it accordingly. After receiving a number of requests, we made it a priority to convert all of our existing eBooks into the ePub format. All of our future books, and we hope to publish over 20 in July, will also be available in this popular eBook format.”

Packt is inviting all customers, who have purchased an eBook, to download the ePub version of the book and enjoy its features and great flexibility. Alternatively, customers can sample the ePub format by accessing one of Packt’s free eBooks. All purchases of new eBooks from today will be made available to download as an ePub file, as well as the standard PDF.

Packt ePub formatted eBooks are available from Tuesday 20th July 2010. To access your first Packt ePub eBook, either previously purchased or one of Packt’s free eBooks, please log into www.PacktPub.com and go to My account.

New Plone Admin book available

I've been learning Plone lately, thanks mostly to LearnPlone.org and Packt's excellent library of new Plone titles.

A site admin can always use a book of new tips, and sure enough, Packt has that one covered too. There's a brand new title available, "Plone 3.3 Site Administration". The book can be viewed here.

There's a copy coming via mail, I promise to provide a review ASAP.

Meanwhile, please try to stay cool in the summer heat.

Happy coding!

P.S. Check that chain on the book cover-- I guess they're plugging Plone's top-notch security. I read today on Slashdot that the CIA uses Plone-- it must be pretty secure!

Book Review for "Groovy for Domain-Specific Languages"

Book Review of "Groovy for Domain-Specific Languages", or how to teach a Java guy Closures and Meta-Programming

Are you an accomplished Java Coder, but not very experienced with the 'dynamic' languages like Python, Ruby or Groovy? I am.

Sure, I know a little about all those languages, especially Python. For quite a while now, I've used Python for scripting and even for quick Hadoop jobs. But the way I used Python wasn't much different than how I'd use Java-- mostly plain Object Oriented technique at the fanciest, more likely just plain old procedural scripting for quick-n-dirty text manipulation jobs. I'd read the occasional article about dynamic language features (like closures, metaprogramming, and built-in builders) but I didn't really have a good idea what those meant.

That all changed after I read "Groovy for Domain-Specific Languages" from Packt.

Groovy, it turns out, is a language built on top of the JVM and it offers really easy integration with Java. (So much so that your Groovy code compiles to JVM bytecode, so all the current Java code you have available to you is also available to your Groovy code.) The book goes about introducing Groovy in terms a Java coder will easily understand, and I think the author did a good job in this respect.

Groovy can be an easier Java. Language verbosity is relaxed, so coders can drop parenthesis, semi-colons, and variable types where it makes sense. This saves a few keystrokes at code-writing time, but more importantly it produces code that's a lot leaner so it can be much more readable. But that's not what helps in DSL construction.

DSLs, for those of you impervious to the growing dev-space din, are "Domain Specific Languages", or little languages meant to serve a single purpose. Never heard of that, you say? How about 'Regular Expressions', 'Make', and 'Ant'? I'm sure you've heard of those! They're all examples of little language that are designed to perform some very specific task, and make the user's life easier than if they had to use a general purpose language like C or Java to accomplish something like compiling a .jar.

This book goes about explaining some of the features a dynamic language like Groovy has that make DSL authoring an easier task. One such feature is the 'Closure' something Java doesn't have at this time. So what's a closure? I'd call it a method, except it's packed up in such a way that you can send it to other methods as a parameter. Confused? Check this example:

def islanders = ["Skipper", "Gilligan"] // This is a List in Groovy
def aClosure = { println "Hello, ${it}" }
islanders.each (aClosure) // This will print "Hello, Skipper" "Hello, Gilligan"

Another DSL-friendly feature of Groovy is Meta-Programming. Meta-Programming is writing code that can change it's behavior at runtime. One flavor of this is Reflection, which I knew from Java-- given the String name of a class, I could conjure up an instance of that class. I'd also seen in Python how you can add properties to an object 'on the fly'-- if that property wasn't there, the class just somehow put it there as soon as you accessed it, and the code went chugging along. But that's just the tip of the iceberg! In Groovy you can have your class respond to method calls that you didn't write at the time the class was authored. Weird! Yet very handy if you're writing a DSL, as the book explains.

The book is really a double-whammy, covering both Groovy-for-the-Java-Coder and Best-Practices-in-Writing-a-DSL. IMHO, it covers the first topic in more detail than the second, but I liked what I got from both.

The book can be found here.

There have been several times in my career where I've written a little language, probably with mixed levels of effectiveness. The next time this topic arises, I have a new weapon to bring out, so I'm waiting on it now!

'Till then,

Happy Coding!