Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Widget for Internet Polyglot - Random Multilanguage Word Of The Day

We developed a widget for viral campaign for Internet Polyglot. You can see it on the sidebar of this blog. It was relatively easy. First develop a jsp page that finds a random word with all translations and then displays it and its image. Then use this page on Widgetbox or Clearspring, do some configuration and voila - the widget is ready!

So now it can be placed anywhere. Yes, practically anywhere: in your blog or a website, in you iGoogle, even on your Vista sidebar! So go ahead, click "Get & Share" and place this widget wherever you want!

Monday, December 22, 2008

Drupal vs. Joomla!

There is a huge number of articles that review Drupal and Joomla! - two the most popular CMS's (Content Management Systems). Most of them are very interesting, educating and entertaining. But until you try it yourself it's useless.

For a new site Mobile Polyglot I decided to try Joomla! first and spent about nightly 4 hours of trying to create a simple, not to say, primitive site. After 4 hours - there are still problems on how to do this, how to change that.

Drupal - 1.5 hours and everything is done! Very elegant and intuitive. Surely, my needs were very primitive and there are a lot of other tasks are waiting in the future. But for the starters - Drupal is the best!

And check out Mobile Polyglot!

Friday, December 19, 2008

Hibernate - reassociated object has dirty collection reference

There is a hard-to-understand hibernate error message happens sometimes:

org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.HibernateSystemException: reassociated object has dirty collection reference (or an array); nested exception is org.hibernate.HibernateException: reassociated object has dirty collection reference (or an array)

I've seen many forum topics discussing what's the problem but none of them somehow gave a good answer.

And the answer is:

Make sure that your object is persistent before you try to lock it. If you try to call hiberante lock on a transient object you'll get this error.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Flex widget

For Internet Polyglot we developed a widget that does the following: it connects to the server, gets the data in JSON format over http and then presents the data to the users. The widget is developed using Flex. The widget looks like the following:



The code for this widget was:


but you can change the languages in this code. For example, if you want to show Spanish-French lessons then simply change wordLanguage and translationLanguage parameters in this code like this:



and the widget will start showing Spanish-French lessons like this: