Construction Information Services (CIS) is the leading supplier of All-Ireland Construction Leads, and it recently launched a new mapping feature for its flagship CIS Online product.
This new feature allows CIS customers to see the exact location of project leads.
The system uses the ARCGIS Online platform, provided by ESRI Ireland, to securely store and display spatial data for each project.
Dovetail had a central role in developing this functionality and was responsible for integrating the ArcGIS platform with CIS Online and backoffice features. The project included:
- Realtime synchronisation of CIS Project leads with the ArcGIS platform using the ArcGIS Online API
- Adding secure maps to CIS Online and to backend researcher systems
- Secure integration of an ArcGIS Online application into CIS Online
- Using the ArcGIS Online Javascript API to project Irish grid coordinates to longitude and latitude.
- Backend functionality to assist the research team to verify the location of project leads.
CIS Ireland is one of Dovetail’s most established clients and it celebrates its 45th birthday this year.
"We have trusted Dovetail with our critical systems since 2007. Dovetail’s philosophy is based on “partnership”. They consistently deliver high quality solutions for our business and I have no hesitation in recommending them.”
- Tom Moloney, Managing Director.
Today, I wanted to create a clone of a SQL Server Azure database. I was looking at various ways of doing this, including exporting and re-importing the database, but thankfully, there is a much easier way.
I ran the following SQL command against the master database on the SQL Azure server:
CREATE DATABASE New_database
AS COPY OF Old_Database
For more details, check out the official documentation and this Idera blog post.
We like to think of Dovetail as a pro-bicycle company, and there are many card carrying subscribers to the Dublin Bikes scheme within the office. When the expansion of the Dublin bikes scheme was announced, we were eagerly anticpating a much shorter journey to our nearest bike station.
Last week, as part of this expansion, the station beside the Guinness Storehouse opened, which means that we now have a two minute walk to our nearest station. Hopefully, with the Guinness Storehouse station such a popular destination for tourists, this station will be stocked with spare bicycles thoughout the working day so we can make our cross city meetings on time.
We recently came across an issue on a customer website where a
photo appeared correctly on most browsers, but was rotated ninety
degrees when viewed on the iPad. The photo even showed up correctly
on the Windows version of Safari.
This was puzzling us; why would one browser decide to rotate a
photo when all others displayed the same photo correctly?
On further investigation, we discovered that this was because of
the EXIF metadata stored in the photo. The camera,
when taking the photo, saved its rotate setting for the photo in
the EXIF metadata, and the iPad browser was just applying this
rotate.
So the simple solution is to remove the EXIF metadata from the photo. This
can be done using an application such as IfranView, or an image
compression website such as PunyPNG. We used PunyPNG, and the
reduced image now displays perfectly on the iPad.
One of the big differences we found between iOS and Android
development, is handling the multitude of screen sizes that come
with Android devices.
The Android solution to this has changed in Android 3.2. Prior
to this, different screen layouts could be specified for small
(~<4 inch), normal (~4 inch), large(~6 inch) and xlarge (~10
inch) screens. In Android 3.2, you can specify layouts based on dp
(density-independent pixel) units.
What we like most is that layouts can be specified for different
available screen widths, meaning that layouts can be
specified for different screen orientations. The YouTube app on the
GalaxyTab does this very well; in the portrait orientation, the
related videos section appears at the bottom, but when switched to
the landscape orientation, this section appears on the right,
making maximum use of the space available.
The android documentation contains detailed
information on screen support, including how to handle screens of
differing pixel densities.
Dublin local authorities, in collaboration with NUI Maynooth,
have made public sector data available on the internet. The aim is
that the public can use this data to create innovative products and
services.
We encourage projects similar to this, which open up data stored
previously in information silos.
For more information, see www.dublinked.ie
One of the better features that came in IIS 7 was the automatic
creation of separate application pools for each web site; this had
to be done manually for each website in IIS 6. Furthermore, in IIS
7.5, the default application pool identity changed from
NetworkService to AppPoolIdentity. Both of these
changes were designed to improve process isolation by using
separate user accounts for each application pool. It also meant
that we do not have to manually create custom Windows user accounts
for our application pools anymore.
All well and good. So how do we set folder permissions (ACLs)
for these applications pools? This is done by setting folder
permissions for the "IIS AppPool\[application pool name]"
user, where [application pool name] is the name of
the application pool in IIS.
When in the Select Users or
Groups dialog, ensure that machine name (Cabbage in my case) is
selected for Locations and Built-in security principals is selected
selected for Object Types, in order to find the application pool
identity user.
Way back when ASP.Net was first released, many web developers
saw the postback as a replacement for JavaScript. Back then, it was
easy to hate JavaScript, with its unfriendly DOM and its different
behaviour in the various browsers. However, the launch of GMail
demonstrated to internet users how a rich UI could be delivered
over the web, and JavaScript was the essential component in most
Web 2.0 applications.
With the growth of cloud computing, JavaScript powered web apps
are becoming more common. Even Microsoft are introducing JavaScript+HTML5 apps in Windows 8.
With transcompilers, developers can create JavaScript code using a
different language, and with Node.Js, JavaScript is being used outside of
its traditional web browser home.
JavaScript, it seems, is here to stay. Below are a few
interesting JavaScript related links for further investigaton:
- JQuery - Needs
no introduction. Essential for web development
- KnockoutJS
- Dynamic JavaScript UIs using the MVVM (Model-View-View-Model)
pattern
- Node.js -
Event driven IO server-side JavaScript environment
- CoffeeScript - a little language that
transcompiles into JavaScript
- ClojureScript
- Clojure to JavaScript transcompiler
- Titanium Mobile - Create native IOS/Android
apps in JavaScript
