More info: http://www.ijcai-11.org/ (official website)

We are going to install and fix all the necessary settings to work on a Windows XP system.

To install Liferay Portal is needed:

- Java 6 JDK
(http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/widget/jdk6.jsp)

- Mysql Community Server 5.x
(http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/).
You’ll need a database manager (Mysql Administrator or other).

- Liferay Portal 5.2.3 CE bundled with Tomcat 6.0
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/lportal/files/Liferay%20Portal/liferay-portal-tomcat-6.0-5.2.3.zip)

- Notepad++
(http://notepad-plus-plus.org/download)

Unzip all the files in your HD. Remember the path in order to the next step.

We need to add a new user variable. Click on “Environment Variables” at “System Properties” section on “My Computer”. Click on “New” and add the variable with this values:

variable name: JAVA_HOME
variable value: C:\Java\jdk1.6.0_20
(you have to put your jdk path here)

Fig. 1. Environment Variable "JAVA_HOME"

Then, edit the system variable “Path” and add the new variable and save all changes.

variable value: %JAVA_HOME%\bin; (don’t delete the other values)

Fig. 2. "JAVA_HOME" added to "Path"

Liferay Portal works with a database called “hsql”. To work with a Mysql database, create a database called “lportal” and a user with all the grants to that database. Then create a file called “portal-ext.properties” on “C:\liferay-portal-5.2.3″. Copy and paste the next code in it:

jdbc.default.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
jdbc.default.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/lportal?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8&useFastDateParsing=false
jdbc.default.username=lportal
jdbc.default.password=lportal

Where the words in bold are: database name, username and password.

On “C:\liferay-portal-5.2.3\tomcat-6.0.18\webapps\ROOT” delete the folders “sevencogs-theme” and “sevencogs-hook” (these are sample themes and hooks).

Now we can run Liferay Portal. Go to

C:\liferay-portal-5.2.3\tomcat-6.0.18\bin (or wherever your folder is unzipped)

and execute “startup.bat”. After a few minutes, the welcome page will appear on your browser.

Fig. 3. Liferay Portal Home page

To get to the portal administration, sign in as:

username: test@liferay.com
password: test

You can download a pdf version here

The main problem is that knowledge engineering is not an expert in field that attempts to model, while the expert on the subject has no
knowledge modeling experience (based on heuristics) in a way that can be represented generically in a system.

An expert system is software that attempts to provide an answer to a problem, or clarify uncertainties where normally one or more human experts would need to be consulted.
Expert systems are most common in a specific problem domain, and is a traditional application and/or subfield of artificial intelligence. A wide variety of methods can be used to simulate the performance of the expert however common to most or all are:

1. The creation of a knowledge base which uses some knowledge representation formalism to capture the Subject Matter Expert’s (SME) knowledge

2. A process of gathering that knowledge from the SME and codifying it according to the formalism, which is called knowledge engineering. Expert systems may or may not have learning components but a third common element is that once the system is developed it is proven by being placed in the same real world problem solving situation as the human SME, typically as an aid to human workers or a supplement to some information system.

Hibernate is designed to be flexible in terms of  table schema used, to adapt to use on an existing database. It also has the functionality to create the database from available information.

Hibernate offers a query language data called HQL (Hibernate Query Language), at the same time to build an API queries programmatically (known as “criteria”).

Hibernate for Java can be used in applications Independent Java applications or Java EE, by the component that implements the Hibernate Annotations JPA standard, which is part of this platform.

An interesting point is connecting Hibernate and Liferay. More info about this experience soon!!

Official site: http://www.hibernate.org/

Meanwhile, you can know the last features of it at the blogs, like the “team” (a new kind of group). I just downloaded bundeled Liferay Portal 6.0 and looks great!!!

Here are some screenshots:

Fig. 1. Home

Fig. 2. Admin Menu

More news soon!!

ICEfaces is a fully featured product that enterprise developers can use to develop new or existing Java EE Ajax applications at no cost. There is an open source project and an Enterprise (commercial) software that extends the open source project.

There are numerous benefits of using ICEfaces to enrich enterprise web applications:

Rich User Experience: Create a superior user experience and produce more effective enterprise Java EE Ajax applications.

Open Source: ICEfaces is the most successful enterprise Ajax Java framework available under open source.

Standards-based: ICEfaces is a pure Java enterprise solution so developers can continue to work the way they are use to. Existing Java IDEs and test tools can be leveraged during development.

Easy Ajax: ICEfaces is much more than a component suite it is a Java Ajax application framework that provides ease of development for Java/JSF developers. ICEfaces applications are developed with minimal design effort in Java/JSF not JavaScript.

Ajax Push: ICEfaces pioneeredAjax Push , enabling server/application initiated content rendering to the browser. WithAjax Push , developers can create collaborative and dynamic Java EE Ajax applications like never before. There is simply no easier way to develop JavaAjax Push applications.

Security: ICEfaces EE is the most secure Java EE Ajax solution on the market today. It is compatible with SSL, prevents cross-site scripting, malicious code injections and unauthorized data mining. As a server-based solution, ICEfaces EE doesn’t expose application logic or user data, plus it is especially effective at preventing fake form submissions and SQL injections attacks.

Project Home page:

http://www.icefaces.org

After looking in several posts and blogs and aiming us to display them in the css file (why we would not do it?) I found an interesting post about Velocity objects.

And now the is an application:

<a href=”#”><img src=”$themeDisplay.getPathThemeImages()/theme/logo.gif” alt=”Logo”></a>

In the “Theme” scenario, we have the “$themeDisplay” variable. We can get the name of the css class, its folder path, the logo name, …

All these variables are in the “init.vm” file in :

{your root\liferay-portal-5.2.3\tomcat-6.0.18\webapps\ROOT\html\themes\_unstyled\templates

If you want to know more about it or just take a look to the code you can visit the official site or click the videos:

Official site:  http://golang.org/

Google Tech Talks (October 30, 2009)

First steps

- Content Management:

• Sharing structures between communities.
• Related contents
• Tagcloud
• Improvements in the management of taxonomies
• Moderation / censorship of content

- Custom Attributes

• Incorporate custom fields to most portlets

- Knowledge base

• Functional module for knowledge management.

- Integrated Workflow

- Audit and usage statistics

- Scalability

Velocity is a Java-based template engine.  As we use Velocity for web development, web designers can work in parallel with Java programmers to develop web sites according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) model. That means that web page designers can focus wholly on creating a site with an awesome, and programmers can focus solely on writing code.
Velocity separates Java code from the web pages, making the web site more maintainable over its lifespan and providing a viable alternative to Java Server Pages (JSPs) or PHP .

But Velocity’s capabilities reach well beyond the realm of the web; for example, it can be used to generate SQL, PostScript and XML from templates. It can be used either as a standalone utility for generating source code and reports, or as an integrated component of other systems. For instance, Velocity provides template services for the Turbine web application framework, together resulting in a view engine facilitating development of web applications according to a true MVC model.

Here are some links:
Apache Velocity Project
Velocity on the Wikipedia