Plugin Downloads : Google Maps plugin : Comments

RE: Google Maps plugin

communities@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 07:05:43 GMT

Hey Jay -- cool stuff!

When you say, "geo information is gathered and saved automatically"... are you grabbing that info based on the users incoming IP, or some other means of tracking?

I know, I know... I could download the src...but right now, brain is completely fried after submitting my plugin for JiraIssues with Flex. <grin>

Good luck, mate!

-T

RE: Google Maps plugin

communities@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 14:44:28 GMT

Hey Tim,

Geez, you were up late, I gave out. If you're like me it was a lot of late nights this week... I'd like to try your plugin but I don't have a local JIRA instance, can I point it to one? I don't know much about Flex, how is it?

Yep, the geo information is all based off of the user's IP. Jive bundles the Maxmind Java API (they use it to look up the country you're from) so you can just import and go. Look in GmapPlugin.java in the plugin source. Here's the code:

String fileName = JiveGlobals.getJiveHome() + File.separator + "plugins" + File.separator + "gmap" + File.separator + "resources" + File.separator + "GeoLiteCity.dat";

lookupService = new LookupService(fileName);

// Assume we have a String IP Address (in dot-decimal form)

location = lookupService.getLocation(presence.getIPAddress().trim());

// store the geo information as user properties

userProperties.put("plugin.gmap.IP", presence.getIPAddress());

if (location != null)

{ userProperties.put("plugin.gmap.latitude", String.valueOf(location.getLatitude()));

userProperties.put("plugin.gmap.longitude", String.valueOf(location.getLongitude())); }

Thanks,

Jay

RE: Google Maps plugin

communities@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 19:04:06 GMT

RE: late nights -- yep, I have an 11 month old little girl, so it's been tough to find time. Mostly consisted of really late nights, especially this past week, into the early morning.

You don't need a local Jira instance to use the plugin. Notice the screenshot is connected to Jivesoftware's Jira server: http://www.jivesoftware.com/issues.

Unfortunately that connection took a lot of time, I had to figure out the XWork Actions with respect to Clearspace to write a proxy to retrieve the data from the external server. Looking at the solution, it seems like a simple thing, but there were a lot of bumps along the way. A lot.

One big problem that nags me is that I really wanted to cache the resulting XML Feeds. I wrote code to do it via jive properties, but ran into some issues there with the large values (the feeds can get big, over 200Kb easily) persisting into the DB.

RE: Flex -- man, I dig Flex. It has its own hurdles and bumps, but it really is amazing what can be done. And I'm no wiz at the layout, nor ActionScript, nor the components library!

For example, the datagrid (i.e. table) has a filter on it...start typing in the box and only rows with the filtertext are displayed in the grid. Could you do that in DHTML - most likely, but I bet it would take a whole lot more than a half dozen lines of code, and you'd have to test it in 5 browsers on 3 platforms.

RE: IP based lookups - it would be interesting to see how accurate they are these days. I remember in the "olden days" the weblog stats showing "geographic location", but since AOL was 60% of the traffic, everyone appeared to be from Virgina, USA. lol!

Cheers!

Timo

RE: Google Maps plugin

communities@jivesoftware.com — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 11:53:55 GMT

Jay,

Great tool!

These are my comments - (Interest level key - 5: highest, 1:lowest )

1. Option for each user not to appear on the map. Should it be off by default?

Interest level – 5

2. Option for each user to override the latitude/longitude set automatically when they login. This would be useful for authors that want to be appear in just one location regardless of where they're really located and for use in a company intranet when everyone has one of a few IPs. Should this be configurable from the admin (Personally I wouldn't want people faking out their location in an external community)?

Interest Level - 4

Comment: Shoud be configurable by admin to prevent some users from users ‘faking’ their location

3. Admin option to set the default latitude/longitude of the map center and the default zoom level. That would be useful when you know your communities are located in a small geographical area.

Interest Level - 4

4. Show more information in the map popup for each author. Possibly make this configurable from the admin.

I decided to go with minimal information to start with and get feedback on what users want.

Interest Level - 5

Code improvements

1. Come up with a different way to get the authors in a community. Currently the plugin is using the Community getXXX methods with a filter but I don't know if this will work well in a community with 100K discussion threads. I've looked at using the search instead and also have considered starting a task on plugin init that builds up a singleton list of authors for each community and then just incrementally updates it much like how search works. I'm not sure how to do this in a cluster-aware fashion though, I think Jive forums has cluster-aware tasks and would want to use that in CS. Is this too much overhead for a map plugin and/or is it over-engineering the problem?

Comment: This would come in very handy given the rate at which a well-designed external facing community grows these days.

RE: Google Maps plugin

communities@jivesoftware.com — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 04:17:38 GMT

Hey abakwaboy,

Thanks, I intend to get started soon on improving the plugin, stay tuned. Did you try it?

Jay

RE: Google Maps plugin

communities@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 16:57:35 GMT

Hey Jay,

We are moving to CSX 1.7. I look forward to deploying the changes.

Thanks,

Abakwa.

RE: Google Maps plugin

communities@jivesoftware.com — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 06:03:18 GMT

Hello Jay,

I tried to use the goggle map plugin on CSX 1.10. Got the following system error message:

"The specified community does not exist"

All communities l used for testing do indeed exist. Is it possible l might have missed a step during set up?

Thx,

Abakwa

RE: Google Maps plugin

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 03:27:13 GMT

Jay,

Thanks for this plug-in. I am getting the same error that abakwaboy is:

"The specified community does not exist"

I'm using ClearspaceX 1.9.0.

Also, and I'm not yet sure this was the result of installing the plug-in, the resolution of ClearspaceX suddenly increased dramatically.

Regards,

Joe

RE: Google Maps plugin

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 03:38:33 GMT

Hey guys,

Sorry for the troubles you're having. It's a known problem and we have yet to figure it out. It appears to be a change to how plugins were rendered in 1.8 or 1.9. You can follow the thread on the problem at http://www.jivesoftware.com/community/thread/15257.

Thanks,

Jay

RE: Google Maps plugin

communities@jivesoftware.com — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 06:12:08 GMT

Hey guys,

I got the plugin working on CS 1.8, see http://www.jivesoftware.com/community/thread/15257?tstart=0 for the details. I'm going to concentrate my time on making it work on CS 2; if you would still like a build for CS 1.8 though let me know and I'd be happy to create one.

Thanks,

Jay

RE: Google Maps plugin

jason.corsello@knowledgeinfusion.com — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 00:52:52 GMT

I am getting the same "...community does not exist" in v 2.0.3. Any thoughts?

RE: Google Maps plugin

communities@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:29:48 GMT

Is the source code for the 2.0 version als available?

RE: Google Maps plugin

communities@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:44:33 GMT

Doh, sorry for the delay, I missed this comment! First things first, are you sure you downloaded the CS 2 version of the plugin?

Jay

RE: Google Maps plugin

communities@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:18:17 GMT

Hey Peter,

Sure, let me add it to the JAR and upload again. I'll do that shortly.

Thanks,

Jay

RE: Google Maps plugin

communities@jivesoftware.com — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 16:34:35 GMT

In the source code for version 1 you have the following lines (class GmapUtils):

Iterable<JiveContentObject> contentObjects = community.getCombinedContent(resultFilter, ContentRetrieval.ALL_TYPES);

rootCommunity.getCombinedContent(resultFilter, ContentRetrieval.ContentType.THREAD);

Eclipse does not like the "getCombinedContent" part any more - is it possible that the command changed and if yes can you tell me how you did the "receive all content" part in the new version?

that would be great!

RE: Google Maps plugin

communities@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 22:15:35 GMT

Sorry for the delay guys, the latest source is up and in the jar. petschni, check out getAllAuthors in GmapJsonAction.

RE: Google Maps plugin

ashishl@juniper.net — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:19:26 GMT

Does this work with clearspace 2.5?

RE: Google Maps plugin

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:20:29 GMT

Hey there,

I haven't tried it on 2.5, just 2.1 or so. Give it a shot and let me know. I'll try and test it out on 2.5 too.

Thanks,

Jay

RE: Google Maps plugin

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 27 May 2009 19:36:41 GMT

HI Jay,

Any news re 2.5?

thanks/Philippa