Google Sites

At work we switched to Google mail some time back. We use Google docs to share docs. I started using Google sites just out of curiosity. Anyone that has a GMail account has automatic access to Google Docs and Google Sites. Google Sites is a simple web site builder. Google Site started as JotBot, a wiki tool that Google bought in 2006 and later developed into what it is today. See wiki article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sites for more info.

Creating a Site
Building a site using Google Site is very easy. Simply click on "Create New Site" button and select any site template available in the template gallery. Then select the Theme and visibility settings, voila... you have the new site up and running. Though, it can be used to build any web site, because of it's original wiki flavor, it's a great tool to create wiki pages. Google site also offers several gadgets that can be embedded thus you can include other web pages, graphics etc. Google Docs can easily be embedded as well.

Creating Web Pages
Once a site is created, pages can be added to it at any time. Google Site by default offers the following page templates:

Web Page
Announcements
File Cabinets
etc

Any of these pages can have embedded content. "Web page" template A simple web page. Each new posting to the site will be an additional page. "Announcements" template offers a Blog/wiki style post where each page will have multiple posts. So a wiki site may contain one page of type "Announcements" and multiple posts in it. It's like a blog, except the pages can be added/updated by anyone (See security settings) and thus it's like a wiki page. File Cabinets shows list of files uploaded. One can create other complex templates based on these.

Each page can have comments and attachments. (These options can be turned off for specific pages as well).

Managing the Site
Site settings can be changed at any time, by clicking on More Actions->Mange Site (Only owners can manage sites). This screen can be reached by clicking on "Edit Sidebar" link. Here several options are shown. Here several options are available. In Site Layout option, you can change the size and layout of the site. This also has a Navigation section. By adding pages (links) here, they can be displayed on the side bar. The theme used for the site can be changed at any time as well.

Security Settings
Google Site access is controlled by "Site Permissions". This can changed at any time. Typically permissions are,

1. Public - Any one can see it
2. Anyone with the link - If someone got hold of the link, they can see it
3. Private - Access only by invite; sign-in required to see the pages.

Google Site vs Wordpress
In many ways, Google Sites can be compared to Wordpress.com blog pages. In both, you can create (web) pages quickly and use gadgets ( extensions) to add functionality. Both provide templates and themes to create web pages quickly. In general, Wordpress has a bigger developer community and is also a more matured product. It also has a lot more extensions available. Sites developed using Google Sites tend to be small personal sites. Since Google Sites had a wiki beginning it is stronger on collaboration of content. It allows each site to have multiple owners, contributors and viewers. This makes it more useful for development community to share information within a team.

My Google Sites
I created my first Google Site for our apartment community. It's a small community and I just created a page or 2 as a bulletin board. After that, I created and maintain a web page for our team to use at work. We create some developer documents which we used to dump on Network drive. The problem there was the files are not easily searchable and thus, after 100's files in the drive, we had to rely on individual's memory and notes. I tried to convert these to posts in the Google Site.

The current site I maintain at work has several pages, some with embedded Google Docs (converted Word, Powerpoint, Excel files). I also used a embedded widget to included an IFrame, so I can display an external web site. Since it's meant to be a collaborative site, I created several pages for various topics, each using "Announcement" template, so several posts can be made to the same page. For e.g., I have PB Wiki, for all posts related to our Powerbuilder development environment. Similarly a "Database Wiki" page for database related postings.

Now that we have site up and running, we need to back it up. I will discuss it in a separate post.

TomCat + Sybase EA Server

Today another coworker of mine was trying to get XAMPP setup work with our EA Server. (We have PB application and Java objects deployed to this EA Server). He has a complete setup of XAMPP with Apache and Tomcat. He has a JSP page that uses the PB objects. This got to a point and crashed with "class not found" error. Clearly pointing to a classpath issue. But which one?

He mentioned that he had to set the EA Server first before he started XAMPP. Clearly there are some conflicts in the classes shared between the 2. EA Server is normally started using a batch file that reads the env classpath (windows settings in control panel) and adds its own classpaths locally. (SET LOCAL inside batch file). So whatever EA Server set is not visible to XAMPP but not the other way around. That's why he had to start EA Server first.

We then looked for the specific class that was "not found". This happened to a stub for the PB objects. In Jaguar manager (aka Sybase Central, EA Server admin) there is an option to generate stubs (and skeletons if needed). This typically points to SYBASEEASERVERHTMLCLASSES directory. We found out that he also similar classes in SYBASEEASERVERJAVACLASSES directory. We knew these were not used, as they were not in the class path. Then we searched for classes or jar files with similar names. We stumbled on a jar file that contains part of these stubs, inside XAMPP. (He uses OpenBD for coldfusion applications, which is why he has XAMPP in the first place). This jar was old and had part of the stubs classes and did not have the one we were having trouble with.

Apparently Tomcat was automatically loading this jar (Anything inside the lib directory gets loaded automatically). We found that when we tried to rename the file.

Now that we found out the classes in trouble, we thought we could just add the class paths needed to the environment classpath and hope Tomcat would pick it up. This did not happen. On the web, I saw a note about how Tomcat handles classpaths differently than regular Java. There was a suggestion to the classpath to the batch file that starts Tomcat. We didn't try that yet.

For now, we decided to copy the classes to the library folder, so Tomcat can automatically load the classes. So, we shut down XAMPP, regenerated the jar file (in EA Server stub generation, there is an option to generate a jar instead of class files) and copied to XAMPP lib folder and everything worked OK.