Very often we work on projects that are hosted on a remote server. There are multiple ways to work on the remote files:

1. ssh into the remote machine and use an editor like vi or emacs to edit the files

2. Develop on your local machine and FTP every change

The second choice is preferable if you want to use an IDE or if the conenction to the server is slow.

However, there is a 3rd approach, that combines the above two. If you are using Eclipse or NetBeans as your editor, then you can connect your editor to the remote server over FTP. I will only cover Eclipse since that is what I use. Read more »

If you are new to Drupal 7 and are creating views, there are lot of changes in what is exposed in the filters. One of the reasons is because Drupal 7 uses views 3.

One example is if you want to create a view of content and you want to add current user as a filter so the uses only see their content.  Read more »

If you are familiar with Drupal Views, you might have come across a very nifty feature called exposed filters. If you expose one of the fields as a filter then views provides a widget and a search option, where the exposed field can be searched. There is good video to learn about filter here.

However, we needed to extend the functionality so all the fields of the content type are exposed as  ‘searchable’ fields, not just the exposed fields. If we expose every fields explicitly, then the views filter will create a textbox for each field, which is not pretty. So in our example, we wanted to search ‘Person’ content type. And if the user entered either the first name, last name, address, of any of the values for the fields in the Person content type, a result would be returned. Read more »

If you are using the Linkpoint API (or Firstdata) as your payment gateway, you might get an error that the connection was refused. The fix is very simple.

Make sure the port 1129 on your server is open both inbound and outbound. This is the port on which Linkpoint receives request for transactions.

To check if the port is open, you can run a curl command from the shell:

curl https://secure.linkpt.net:1129/ Read more »

Drush is a powerful shell for Drupal. It can many developer tasks really easy to manage from the command line. If you are installing it on Mac OSX, there might be a step or two which you have to perform for Drush to work correctly.

If you have pear or wget on your machine, then the process would be straightforward as described on the Drush site. However, if you are manually downloading the Drush then:

1. Download and untar the Drush in a directory outside your Drupal. Read more »

Drupal 6 offered two ways to display a node - teaser and full mode. However, There might be custom display types required - e.g. RSS display, search result or even home page display. Drupal 7 offers Custom View Modes to achieve custom rendering of the nodes.

You can create new view modes very easily using code or a module like Entity view modes

I will provide an overview of the code required to create a new view mode and defining a new node.tpl to display the node in the newly defined mode Read more »

SAP recently announced its in-memory computing as a new technology offering which promises to significantly change the way business is done. In-memory computing brings together both hardware and software innovations in a way that is difficult to match. Hasso Plattner made the announcement at SAPPHIRE 2010, emphasizing that the R in ERP will be ‘real time’. Read more »

Are you an Android developer who wants to integrate your app with Twitter and Facebook so that your end user can:

1. Login with Twitter

2. Post messages to Twitter

It’s not so hard to achieve these two - if you know what you are doing. And the steps below should make it easy for you to achieve the desired results.

I did find it easier to integrate Facebook than integrating Twitter. And you will see why. So let’s get the difficult one out of the way and handle the Twitter integration.

Twitter integration with Android:

The basic steps are:

1. You have to create an Account on Twitter before you do anything.

2. Register you application with Twitter here (https://dev.twitter.com/user)

3. Create the Activity to enter your tweet

4. Authenticate users and let the user grant you access to your application so your application can post on his/her stream

5. Sit back and smile Read more »

I have developed applications on the three of the most common platforms - iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. Did I hear someone say what about MS and Nokia? They are quite non existent as either the phones or good development support respectively are missing. And to me the effort is not worthwhile. Read more »