Testing GWT Application in Virtual Machine

I am devel­op­ing on a Mac, but to test my GWT appli­ca­tions for cross-browser com­pat­i­bil­ity in Inter­net Explorer I need to use Win­dows, thus I got Win­dows 7 installed using Par­al­lels. Just by the way, to be able to test in dif­fer­ent Inter­net Explorer ver­sion, I am using a pretty handy appli­ca­tion called IETester.
But try­ing to access local­host with IE in the vir­tual machine did not work. I got a “404 page not found” error instead of see­ing my app run­ning on the local App Engine instance. Obvi­ously, Par­al­lels does not auto­mat­i­cally for­ward local­host requests to OSX and maybe that is actu­ally a good idea security-wise.
To fix the issue, you need to run Google App Engine on a pub­lic net­work inter­face, or in other words, bind the App Engine server to all avail­able IP addresses. The down side: every­body know­ing your IP address can see the GWT app now, but oth­er­wise you are not allowed to access it in the viru­tal machine as from your OSX’s point of view, that Win­dows machine is “some other guy access­ing from the out­side”, too. To make GAE acces­si­ble from the out­side, add the para­me­ter “-bindAd­dress 0.0.0.0″ when launch­ing you local GAE. Using Eclipse you can achieve that by right click­ing your project -> Run As -> Run Con­fig­u­ra­tions -> Choose “(x)= Argu­ments” tab; add the option to the top most box titled “Pro­gram argu­ments” in the options area (e.g. before “-port 8888″).

The first part of the list of argu­ments should look some­thing like that:

-remoteUI "${gwt_remote_ui_server_port}:${unique_id}" -startupUrl GlocalUiPg2.html -logLevel INFO -codeServerPort 9997 -bindAddress 0.0.0.0 -port 8888 ...

Now, you can access you app using the OSX’s pub­lic IP address. (You can get to know your IP by hav­ing a look at the net­work pref­er­ences panel.) Launch­ing GAE from Eclipse, you will see a dif­fer­ent link (URL) in the “Devel­op­ment Mode” tab now, con­tain­ing the pub­lic IP already. Using that one in, say, your Fire­fox on Mac, it will ask you now whether you want to allow the debug­ger access. That is also due to the fact, that you are now using a pub­lic address, so it is not clear to your local debug server, whether that request came from the same com­puter or some­one else in the network.

Getting Drupal’s Access Control Module to Work Properly

After set­ting up some con­tent types — some pub­lic, some inter­nal. I installed the Access Con­trol mod­ule, set up inter­nal con­tent not to be vis­i­ble to anony­mous users — but with­out any effect.

After some research, but with­out suc­cess, I real­ized the *Advanced* sec­tion at the bot­tom of the Access Con­trol tab for each con­tent type. And now the magic trick: Increase the weight and you are done. So I guess the build in access man­age­ment was fight­ing the Access Con­trol mod­ule, so it is up to you to make your favorite mod­ule stronger by giv­ing it more weight. — I doubt this is intu­itive. Addi­tion­ally, it is for sure dif­fi­cult to sim­ply find the tiny lit­tle select box down there in a sec­tion, which is by default folded.

education portal for the city of Augsburg

A new por­tal has been launched for the city of Augs­burg. It is meant to be a cen­tral plat­form about all kind of infor­ma­tion and events con­cern­ing edu­ca­tion in and around Augs­burg (Ger­many). Dif­fer­ent lay­outs have been cre­ated in the course of a sem­i­nar, the one to be real­ized, has been cho­sen by a per­son in charge of the munic­i­pal­ity. Two stu­dents of the “win­ning” team and myself, we formed a team, got a work con­tract by the munic­i­pal­ity and imple­mented the web­site on the basis of the Typo3 CMS within one year, besides our studies.

» go to see the website »

Content and navigation as zoomable UI and masked floating layer

See the Zoomable UI/floating layer nav­i­ga­tional approach of my old (unmain­tained!) home page (in german).

This ver­sion of my home­page fea­tures a new nav­i­ga­tional con­cept com­bin­ing the idea of zoomable inter­faces and a masked float­ing layer. I cre­ated this appli­ca­tion as exper­i­ment while search­ing for con­cepts and idea about how to inte­grate con­tents and nav­i­ga­tional layer.

After infor­mal feed back of user i asked to give it a trail, I had to find, in the end, this RIA will stay more an exper­i­ment than a easy to use infor­ma­tion portal.

The text and media con­tained is in ger­man and has not been update ever since, addi­tion­ally the guest book is deac­ti­vated. There­fore give it a trail but do not take the con­tent seri­ous .