Latest Leadership Posts

Latest Posts

Fri

Jul

2009

GSOC JConnect Status Update 3

Written by Arunoda Susiripala

Labels: Arunoda Susiripala, Common Gateway for Joomla, Akarawuth Tamrareang

It's ready

JConnect - The Integration Engine for Joomla is now pretty much ready. (OK we say it BETA). Before we going into much details lets talk about it's features. It can do following with it's External Applications.. (Currently only Elgg)

Dual-way communication..
whatever the changes you made to a user(Create,Update,Delete) it'll affect to Both Joomla and ExApp. no mater where you made it (inside Joomla or Elgg)
Bulk User Synchronization
you can synchronize users in many numbers between Joomla and ExApp.
Dual Login (Single Sign On)
you can login into one site and go for a another site and do your work without login again. (a site may be Joomla or a ExApp)
Activity Module
you can see the activities in the ExApp inside Joomla in a Module..
Sync User Management
you can manage user sync users inside Joomla
Admin Panel
contains a easy to use admin Panel to control all of these
Advanced Contols
helps you to control the communication between Joomla and ExApps

JConnect Admin Panel

Get It

Currently JConnect Only support Elgg as an External Application. So you can get,

JConnect Engine and,
Elgg plugin (makes elgg as an JConnect ExApp)

You can download above from here..
http://code.google.com/p/jconnect/downloads

And documentation to Install And Configure JConnect with Elgg can be found here....
code.google.com/p/jconnect/wiki/GettingStarted

Review It

I'll really apriciate comments and you review on this..

Plese comments below this Article or http://code.google.com/p/jconnect/wiki/Comments
If any kind of issue arise please kind enought to submit those in here..
code.google.com/p/jconnect/issues

What's next

Dual Login does not works for cross domains yet.. I'm working on it..
User group consideration when synchronization (which is not currently supportes)
Developer support (JConnect ExApps can be easily created - but a good Documentation should come up)

26 Votes

18 Comments

Feed

Cristiano makes this comment

2009-07-03 07:03:25

Wonderful!
Does it work like JFusion, isn't it?
I'm waiting the dev docs to go deeper in how you get it to work
ankit.ahuja makes this comment

2009-07-03 08:38:26

Great Idea to put it on Google Code. That way, it is easy to download and report issues. I think I might do the same as well.
arunoda.susiripala makes this comment

2009-07-03 10:40:14

yes ankit. it's really helpful. I simply use Google Code we can easially see the revisions,diff ...
It's better that Eclipse SVN tool...
And remember to maintain the labs.joomla.org svn too...
Anh Nguyen makes this comment

2009-07-03 11:35:44

Wow, looks like JFusion has another competitor , JConnect.
anh.nguyen makes this comment

2009-07-03 11:42:21

Wow, looks like JFusion is gonna have another competitor

It'd be better if you could setup a demo site for JConnect coz not everyone is used to and/or has time to download Elgg and try this out
arunoda.susiripala makes this comment

2009-07-03 12:03:37

Hi anh.nguyen Yes I'm deciding to have such a one.. Because I'm not very good at Elgg(mainly deploying stuff) I'm having difficulties to host a Elgg site remotely.. as soon as I solve that domo site could be have ..

And also If someone can help me to deploy Elgg on s remote server it's very helpful...
William Filer makes this comment

2009-07-08 20:09:59

arunoda,

I can help setup an ELGG site for you, or you can use mine as your BETA site (sustainablepainters.com). Maybe we can chat about this. I may also be willing to hire you as a consultant at a later date. William
arunoda.susiripala makes this comment

2009-07-10 06:52:25

Thank You William for coming me for help..
My mentors have setup me a Elgg site and I'can go live in few days..
And I appreciate you suggestion to use JConnect as BETA ...
and I'm clueless about your contact details....

are U the admin of sustainablepainters.com
samir makes this comment

2009-07-12 13:18:44

I tried installing it on my local server but somehow not able to get it working.

Regards,
Sam.
arunoda.susiripala makes this comment

2009-07-16 03:56:48

Hi samir can u please put some detail of ur problem @ our issue tracker @ jconnect.googlecode.com
Kiwi Chris makes this comment

2009-07-18 19:39:02

Hi all, and thanks for doing this work for all of us.

I have tried to use this for my elgg site, which is still in test mode.

Question I have is to do with file path.

Where should Joomla be in relation to Elgg.
Kiwi Chris makes this comment

2009-07-23 04:56:29

I have installed with the updated downloads, now all the users are moved over to joomla from elgg, but you can not login to joomla, the database passwords look completely different also.

Any feedback in regards to this, is not the idea to sync then users can log into either elgg or joomla.

Please advise

Sujoy makes this comment

2009-07-23 11:41:17

From Elgg try to login using Joomla user by clicking use jconnect >

Fatal error: Call to a member function needsSigning() on a non-object in
Cwamp\www\joomlaX\components\com_jconnect\helpers\openid\Auth\OpenID\Server.php
on line 1495"

Zachariah makes this comment

2009-07-24 01:00:43

Can you, from the developer standpoint, give any advantages / disadvantages to using this vs. JFusion as a base to bridge an external app?
arunoda.susiripala makes this comment

2009-07-29 17:03:59

@Kiwi Chris

yes once you've done the user-sync it'll create the users inside joomla but doesnot set password. coz hashing methods used in Elgg and Joomla is different and it's no way to get the plain text password from the elgg db...

so what we did is like this...
although user-sync is done each every Elgg user have to log-in to the Elgg site using Elgg login (then it'll pass the plain-text password to Joomla)

After that that user-can login into Joomla.
and also he can changed the password from Joomla or Elgg
arunoda.susiripala makes this comment

2009-07-29 17:22:24

@Zachariah

Yes there are some advantages and disadvantages of Both...
Advantages of JConnect
-----------------------
1.When you using in-order to bridge with some ExApp you don't need to code inside Joomla.(JFusion does that)
2.Special API and Hooking system can be used to develop the bridge (we call it JConnect ExApp API)
3.Cross Domain Single Sign On and Sign Out
4.Built in dual way communication
5.No need to hack the ExApp code and find how they done some-thing insted we can use ExApp's native framework/API
eg:- when using JFusion you need to get the hashing code of Elgg into Joomla and do the hash here and update the password.
Disadvantages of JConnect
--------------------------
1.End User's have to install extension for ExApps and Joomla!
2.Some overhead of transmitting data between applications
(In JF we basically manipulate database and in JC we communicate over web services!)
3.JConnect doesn't have visual integration

I think JConnect is more developer centric and given freedom to use their code's to bridge insted of writting code inside Joomla!

thanks!
Kiwi Chris makes this comment

2009-08-18 08:22:04

I got this all working on a test site, very happy with this.
Good Work.
shaobing makes this comment

2009-11-03 04:47:45

hope there will be a java api too,