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The Internet turns 40

Written by Wilco Jansen Friday, 30 October 2009 08:31

It was exactly forty years ago on this Friday that the first link on Arpanet was created. On 29 october 1969 at half past ten in the evening a connection was made between the university of Los Angeles and Stanford. The first connection in the Netherlands was there at October 30. ARPANET, a project of the U.S. defense research organization Arpa, was the mainstay of the Internet as we know it today.

Arpanet was obviously not the only important link in the development of the Internet: tcp / ip, Cyclades and the breakdown of Arpanet in a military research arm and also contributed to much. The www was of great importance, this application of the Internet - by many as a synonym for 'Internet' is used - made sure that the Internet could be rapidly popular among 'ordinary' users.

Check out the slideshow on the Guardian website if you are interested in a quick overview of the development of the Internet. No doubt that the ideas of Tim Berner Lee made the web available for the general public, read his original proposal and be amazed how this led to the Internet as we know it.

Happy birthday Internet!

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How to download the latest version of Joomla 1.6

Written by Wilco Jansen Friday, 16 October 2009 22:00

At the current download page of Joomla you will not find a nightly build download option as it was available earlier on (1.0 and early 1.5 development). There are a lot of people who are eager to see the current state of 1.6 and would like to download a development version. In this article I will explain how you can get a copy of the latest development version.

Before we show the tools that can make it happen, I would like to explain a bit more on how the Joomla codebase is maintained. The Joomla development team is storing changes to the code into a software versioning system called Subversion. The code is stored in a so called commit, saying no more that the changes that de developer has made locally are uploaded to a central repository. That repository can be access by a web browser or tools that have been build for easy maintenance of the software. It is possible to go back to every state of the development by reverting versions since every change is stored in this central repository.

When an official release is build a copy is extracted from this software repository and from that extract the compressed files are generated that you then can download. For official releases this process is automated, but if you are interested in the last version of the code you can manually export the data from the repository. What I normally do in such a situation is export the data into the webfolder of my development system, in my case that is '/var/www'.

It is actually pretty straight forward, let me give an example of a command line export on Ubuntu (subversion client is installed of course).

cd /var/www
svn export http://joomlacode.org/svn/joomla/development/trunk/ --username anonymous
Authentication realm: <http://joomlacode.org:80> Document repository
Password for 'anonymous':

As you can see we do a checkout from the 1.6 trunk location (http://joomlacode.org/svn/joomla/development/trunk/) and use anonymous access to retrieve the repository. There are several different clients available that can read the subversion repository on a variety of platforms (Windows, Linux, MAC). Under windows you can use for example Turtoise SVN, all you then need to do is to right-click on a folder in the explorer en you can select the export option. Obviously it would be the easiest way if the daily build option was re-introduced on joomla.org...

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Hierarchical data, nodes and nested sets in 1.6

Written by Wilco Jansen Wednesday, 14 October 2009 21:44

In this article I will focus on the recently committed library 'libaries/jocularr/database/tablenested.php'. This class initially implemented the unlimited nested categories and is also used for the 'asset' and 'usergroup' tables. The class 'JtableNested' is introduced in Joomla 1.6 and implements the nested data-set logic.

One of the most requested features for Joomla, beside ACL, was the desire to get rid of the section and category limitation. In Joomla 1.6 this problem is solved by providing the categories to be stored and presented as an hierarchical dataset. Hierarchical data-sets are also available in Drupal for example, the most common known implementation within Drupal is de node structure that is the corner stone of the Drupal data-model.

Well that is interesting, is it not? Joomla 1.6 is going to provide you with the libraries where you actually can manage data in a hierarchical way, or if you prefer as a node based way. In this article I will go into the underlying theory of managing hierarchical data and the specific implementation that has been chosen by the development team called nested sets. It looks like the nested category work was inspired on an article by Mike Hillyer describing the theory behind adjacency list models and the nested set data model and the initials work done by Enno Klassing during the Summer of Code 2007. This Jfoobar article is also based on Mike Hillyer writing.

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FOSDEM is calling you

Written by Robin Muilwijk Tuesday, 13 October 2009 19:00

FOSDEM, a developer-oriented Free and Opensource conference in Europe, will be taking place in Brussels, Belgium on Saturday 6 and Sunday 7 February 2010. Over the weekend FOSDEM has placed several calls for participation.

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See you at the Joomladay New York!

Written by Wilco Jansen Wednesday, 07 October 2009 12:00

On my way back home from the Wisconsin User Group meeting I decided to stay a bit longer to also visit the New York Joomladay. For the first time in years I am not listed as a speaker and attend the Joomladay as a community member which gives me some additional time to talk to people.

The program has some really interesting topics, if you are close you should consider going there because Joomladays are events you should not misse. Not sure you still can get a ticket, I suggest you check out the Joomladay New York site if this is possible. As with the JUG I expect to meet a lot of old Joomla friends and am looking forward to the talks.

Hope to meet you there!

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Learn what a web browser is by watching a 1 minute video

Written by Arno Zijlstra Tuesday, 06 October 2009 21:02

There you go, finally you have a site to show your mom and dad when they call you again with something like "my search engine want's to update, what should I do?".

Google has put together a site to simply explain what a browser actually is. And looking at the video below it's certainly needed.

Check the site out at whatbrowser.org and watch the video.

Oh man, it's needed

Source: Techcrunch

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