Serfe - IT Talent and Creativity - Web Development - Web Design

Internet Explorer 6

Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) was released on 27 August 2001, more than 8 years ago, and is the default browser shipped with Windows XP. The market share of this browser continues to decline, now being below 14% globally and less than 7% in Europe and USA. This version of Internet Explorer (IE) has several problems:

• Does not support PNG transparencies
• Contains errors when using float + margin / padding
• Inability to use pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements.
• Incomplete support of CSS 2.1
• Presents display errors

Developing systems or websites with IE6 compatibility means spending hours to solve displaying bugs and limit the designs so that they appear correctly in this browser. Besides the user experience is limited to the possibilities available in IE6, modern browsers (IE7, IE8, Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Google Chrome, Opera 10, etc.) can offer a much better online experience.

It is because of this that from March 2010 IE6 won’t have support on systems and sites developed by Serfe. This means that if you want to have support for this version of Internet Explorer, you must explicitly request it.

Following our training program, last November we attended the course “Software Requirements, Concepts and Practices for Agile Teams” delivered by Mr. Luiz Parzianello and organized by the Foundation for the development of new technologies.

Its objective was to develop basic skills necessary to capture, analyze, specify and validate a Product Backlog (requirements) effective preserving agile principles and practices. These where the main topics:

• Present the risks of decision-making process of the human mind and its influence on software requirements.
• Submit an effective way of identifying the scope of software project based on business analysis and project.
• Present models and effective practices for working with requirements in agile methodologies with techniques for estimating the size of the problem.
• Develop an awareness of Planning and Production Control (PCP) for the management of requirements based on concepts and practices of inventory control.

Of course that also took the opportunity to take a walk in the hills of Cordoba.

Do you have a business plan?

CRM is a tool for the management of customer relationships. It is very useful in any business, from manufacturing goods to those that provide services as it allows to plan a business strategy based on clients. This tools become essential in global markets like IT services where retain a customer is more important than winning new ones.

This tool is an open system data (front office) that gives us the opportunity to exchange information with customers. To create records which allow us to see the concept of value that the customer has with the product, to focus on the real needs processes that give rise to the application and delete processes that result in an increase in the price of the product without increasing its value. We can also anticipate new requirements and provide better after-sales services.

The use of a CRM system often fails or doesn’t give the desired results because its implementation is only limited to software installation without studying the context of the company, nor provide the necessary knowledge to its employees. A CRM system should be implemented only after studying the current relationship with customers and defining the new one that the company  wants to reach. Once we know that we will have a clearer picture of which systems we will need, which procedures will need to be standardized and on which topics will be needed to train the staff of the organization.

The CRM software was initially developed by payment and large companies. Recently, however, began to emerge such as “open source”, ie free and open source. This brings with it the following advantages: low cost and the possibility of changing them to the needs of each company.

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The last October 12th was our anniversary that`s why the last Friday we prepare an Asado to celebrate our first 6 years of our company. Years of a lot of work and effort, new challenges and projects, of new opportunities, but also of strengthening, achievement and consolidations.

Thanks to everyone that trust us and make this possible.  It would be no fun without you.

Work team - October 2009

Asado in celebration of 6 years of Serfe.com

Kinds Regards

Serfe.com team

This article will explain how to develop customized components for Joomla in the 1.0.x version, showing the files and basic steps, as well as some useful methods such as access to the database, paged results, etc. It is recommended to have knowledge of PHP and HTML to read this article.

Directory structure

Joomla has a directory structure divided into 2 big groups. Administrator, where are all the files needed for the backend to work and the various directories that are located in the root directory.

The directories of interest are the components, both within the administrator directory, as in the root directory, since here is where the files for each component are, which in turn are in sub-directories as follows, com_componentName, example com_users.

If we want to see the files corresponding to the users component, must look at

• Administrator/components/com_users (backend)
• Components/com_users (frontend)

Another important is the includes directory, since within it we find files that have classes that are going to be used in the component, for example to connect the database (database.php), to manage user data, paging, etc (joomla.php).

The components are stored in the database, more precisely in the jos_components table.

Files that make up a component

A component to be installed must be compressed in a zip file, with the following format com_ComponentName.zip example com_users.zip.

This file must have at least 8 files that are going to be described in brief:

• admin.componentName.php (backend)
• admin. componentName.html.php (backend)
• toolbar. componentName.php (backend)
• toolbar. componentName.html.php (backend)
• componentName.xml (backend)
• componentName.class.php (opcional)
• componentName.php (frontend)
• componentName.html.php (frontend

The following describes each file. Read the rest of this entry »

This article aim will be to provide an introduction to the content management system called Joomla, describe its main features and how it is made.

What is Joomla?

Joomla is an open source Content Management System (CMS) built with PHP under a GPL license. This o Content Management System can be used to create a website with dynamic content, using a MySQL database.

Features:

• Websites organization.
• Publication of contents.
• Scalability and implementation of new functionalities.
• User’s management.
• Websites design.
• Navigation and menu.
• Image manager.
• Modifiable modules order.
• Polls.
• Advertising.
• Statistics of visits.
• And more…

Which websites can be created with Joomla?

With Joomla we can create news websites, corporate sites, community portals, and we can also create with Joomla systems operating on closed networks (Intranets) to manage internal information (communications, users, etc) from companies or business firms. Read the rest of this entry »

Basic Implementation of a Web Service client with PHP

A web service is an application that exposes or publish its functionalities or methods through an interface. It works in client-server mode, other applications talk to the web service using messages in a standardized format. Essentially, the communication is the same as a web server returning requested data by a browser such as an HTML page, the only difference is that instead of serving up HTML in response to HTTP requests, it serves up SOAP (XML) responses to SOAP requests.

Four elements make a web service:

• XML

Standard format for exchange data primarily designed to the web. Its principal advantage is that a developer can define his own tags, this fix the way the data are read and validated by the client applications. XML schemas must be public so any change made in the application doesn’t affect communication. An xml file begins with this header:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> Read the rest of this entry »

				

One version or revision of a product is the state where it is at a given moment in its development or modification. Version control is the management of various changes made on the elements of a product. A Version Control Systems allow us to manage different versions of each product developed and made possible customizations (eg for a specific client). In the case of software is used to track different versions of source code that are continually modified by the development team. The most used tool for this is Subversion.

Subversion is a software Version Control System that seeks to replace the popular CVS, which has several shortcomings. It is open source and is also known as svn (because this is the name of the command-line tool).

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We are pleased to announce that we have completed the requirements phase of JReserv project. Here are the features that we will implement in the first version.

1. Management:
   1. Resources Management
   2. Packages Management
   3. Prices and Availabilities Management
   4. Clients Managements
   5. Agents Managements
   6. Configuration Managements
2. Services that would be offered to visitors:
   1. Resources Catalog and Packages
   2. Online Booking

1 Resources Management:

The system will allow the management of resources, allowing to Create, Read, Update y Delete (CRUD) them. The system must store relevant information about it including: title, description and images.

Also should allow to classify the resources in a flexible manner in order to be suitable for any business allowing the proper adaptation of the tool to any environment. A resource may be associated with more than one category. At the same time, a category can be classified in other parents categories. For example, for a resource of a hotel called “Double Room”, which may be associated with the following categories “Caesar Hotel” to define that it belong to this hotel. At the same, this hotel may be associated with “Santa Fe” to identify to which city belongs. The category “Caesar Hotel” may be a children of another category called “Emperors Chain” to identify which chain owns the hotel while “Santa Fe” is the children of “Argentina” to determine to which country it belongs. As you can see this is very flexible and could be adaptated to any business.

A bookable category may be associated to one or more addons. These addons can be purchased at the same time of the booking. For example, by booking a “Double Room” we would be able to add to our order a “Dinner Menu”. It is possible that the addons impact on the price of the reservation.

Picture 1: Entities associated with resources

Resources and categories would also have associated properties that represents its characteristics. Having this information in a separate entity will allow to perform searches of resources and categories which have these characteristics in common. As an example, the resource “Double Room” could have assigned properties “Jacuzzi”, “Private Bath”, “Air Conditioning”. Then if you’re interested in making a reservation for a room with Jacuzzi you could make a filtering to obtain a list of all the rooms that have those features and then choose between them.

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What is MySpace?

If you have a profile of “Developer” on MySpace then you will be able to create applications. These can be of 2 types: internal or external. The first are developed to introduce into our profile iframes with our applications, the second type (which we are interested in remaining article) allow us to create ‘Lives App’ or  external applications of MySpace in order to extract information from the API and use it on our websites. This tool is known as MySpaceID.

Implementation:

The first thing we must do is create an application on our MySpace account developers (must have prior permission to develop, this procedure takes about 48hs).

When we have access, go http://developer.myspace.com/community/ -> MyApps -> Create New MySpace Application and choose type.

In ‘external callback’ Enter the URL of our site and remember to save OAuth Consumer Key and OAuth Consumer Secret.

Once created the application must publish, we should see a sign: Status changed to [Live], if this happens we are able to use our site.

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