During deployments to Staging, Pre-Production and Production environments you typically have a good number of SQL scripts that you need to run.

One solution would be to just take a directory listing straight from a command prompt and dump it into a batch file. This gets tedious, so I wrote a C# command line application to attach a text file to the batch script (to include instructions and any other important information) and then populate batch files for the Staging, Pre-Production and Production environments.

Drupal can be readily configured to act as an Intranet or Extranet solution.  An Intranet is generally defined as an information system for posting and sharing information that functions in much the same way as the general Internet, except that the information is restricted for people within the organization: employees, managers, board of directors, etc.  An Extranet is simply an Intranet the allows select access to groups or individuals outside of the organization: vendors, partners, clients, etc.

I learned a fun bit of java trivia the other day, that I thought I'd share.  Let's say you have a lazy-loaded singleton design including the following code:

...
public static MySingletonClass getInstance() {
	if (instance == null) {
		instance = new MySingletonClass();
	}
	return instance;
}
...

Of course, in a threaded application, you'll want to make the setting synchronized, so you can be sure that two threads calling getInstance() simultaneously for the first time don't create it twice. So all you need to do is synchronize it, right?

Matt and I have been experimenting with part of the JNLP API called SingleInstanceService.  Basically, it's a sort of super-static singleton class that's shared between all running instances of the application.  This is really cool in theory, as it allows you do do things like count the number of running instances, and allow only one.  There's some great code implementation examples, as well.

Drupal is a great Content Management System out-of-the-box, but one of its real strengths lies in its extensive variety of modules. There are a number of modules which are so useful that we generally always install them with every Drupal implementation that we do.  I've listed them here grouped by general function for you.

May 9th 2008 marks the 10-year anniversary for Vision Multimedia Technologies, LLC!  We've come a long way in the last decade, and couldn't have done it without the support of our wonderful customers, partners, and friends.  A heartfelt thank you goes out to all of those who have worked with us over the years!

For quite some time I have had rather ambitious plans surrounding the VMT Blog portion of our website. Every day our programmers solve dozens of problems ranging from the mundane to the bizarre. These issues span the gamut of the technologies that we work with, and many of the problems are generic in nature and require a bit of research to resolve.

Yesterday I discovered you cannot use apache to host multiple ssl-enabled sites on the same ip address. This was rather irking, but not the end of the world for my current project.

Apache will just use the first SSL declaration it finds for all following vhosts, and since it is TCP layer 4 and HTTP is TCP layer 5, this makes since the session is already setup by the time it gets the http request.

Effective August 24th, VMT has moved to its new location in the historic Stieff Silver Building in Hampden.  As a result of this move our phone and fax numbers have changed!  Our old number, 410-532-7138 should still function, but our official new number is 410-889-7770.  Please update your records with our new information:

800 Wyman Park Drive
Suite 310
Baltimore, MD 21211
Phone: 410.889.7770
Fax: 443.817.0749

Please feel free to email us at info@vmtllc.com with any questions.