Mayflower Blog

If you use Dojo, have a look at the fabulous widgets called TurboWidgets from TurboAjax.com: it's available for non-commercial and commercial usage. One of the great widgets (besides Theme support where you can also create your own corporate theme look and feel) is a data grid which can be customized in a wide variety.

As I've discovered in the TurboWidget forums, they're working on a virtual data grid. Imagine you want to display a list of 100,000 or more items which can be a major pita especially when working with slow internet connectivity. The solution is a real virtual data grid. They showcase a demo here. Release date will be hopefully by end of July, and I'm looking forward to it. :-)

As you can see in the screenshots, while scrolling down the grid will be empty or displaying "..." ....

... while loading the data. After finished loading, it shows the normal grid data:

Unfortunately, we have to wait until end of July, but I hope the guys from TurboAjax will have it ready soon. :-) Combined with a XMLHttpRequest based PHP backend (which will be triggered by the Grid's data model) this will be a very userfriendly solution for displaying large data sets.

Found at the namics blog: the presentation of David Nuescheler, "AJAX Showcases: the good, the bad and the ugly" from the EuroAjax conference. Very nice. The presentation is available as PDF or as Flash. David gives his opinion through showcasing the HTTP Request analysis of several AJAX based applications.

Wow! Our development team did a terrific job baking some new releases this week. While Albrecht is enjoying his holidays very much, I can feel the sweat of the team preparing everything for launching in time two releases.

The 5.0 branch got a new release: 5.0.2. It mainly is a bug fix release and marks the last release of the 5.0 branch which will be closed as of today. Just hang over to the release announcement by Franz Graf on phprojekt.com.

As of today, we are proud to announce the release of the first beta version of PHProjekt V5.1. Our Mayflower fellow Nina Schmitt tells: "Our main goal was to further enhance the usability and functionality of PHProject with this new Version, but some new features were added as well". She points out that we need further tests from the community and report bugs on the bug tracker at our thinkforge.org development forge.

Continue to read this post to see what is new in this 5.1 branch. And don't forget to download it!

VoIP is not only fun with Skype. Instead, your company might use OpenSource solutions like Asterisk or even more proprietary solutions like an Innovaphone VoIP infrastructure. Here at Mayflower, we're using two Innovaphone IP800 gateways at each of our departments (Munich and Würzburg). They are connected to each other and replicate their data. Besides that, the Gateways do use LDAP for saving the contact data and provide a SOAP interface for connecting to the PBX.

In a crazy moment in my sparse free time, I had a look at Gregor's PhoneMonitor application he's written in C# and decided to write a PHP5 based approach to connect to the PBX and handle calls.

The result is a SOAP client library that is able to connect to a PBX, poll for events, register users and create calls between two endpoints.

Making calls is a piece of cake:

// $pbxbase is an instance of a class that handles the low-level PHP5 SOAP calls
$sessionId = $pbxbase->createSession('Björn Schotte', 'mydemoapp');
$userobj = $pbxbase->createUserObjectID('Björn Schotte', true);

$pbxuser = new PBXUser($pbxbase);
$call_handle = $pbxuser->callCN($userobj, 'Gregor Streng');
// if you want to dial an external number, just use
// $call_handle = $pbxuser->callPhone($userobj, '093112345');

In the screenshot you can see a small Firefox sidebar application (streaming) that polls for events on the PBX, meaning that is able to show which user in your PBX group currently has an active call and which user is free (in the screenshot "Björn Schotte" is currently having an active call and his name displayed in red + a small icon. If he hangs up the phone, his name will be displayed normally and the icon will disappear). The next step will be some kind of integration in our groupware PHProjekt so that I'm able to easily call a contact inside the web application. Of course, there's also TAPI, but SOAP could be another approach.

I'm not sure if there's something similar yet available for the Asterisk stuff (SOAP interface). Does anyone have a clue?