Category: life

At 20th August,I got confirmation about Final Evaluations that I have Passed and I am Google Summer of Coder 2010 now. I am very very happy and my University (they featured me at their website and at notice board as well) and my Family is also delighted as well. Sorry for delayed in this post, Actually I had exam at 25th August and then I had  to submit a term paper of Software Requirements Engineering. I submitted term paper after 2 weeks of due date and thanks to my teacher who accepted it finally.

Over the last week, I had managed to make the EPS Schema working. So, finally PDF,SVG,DIA and EPS Schema’s are working fine while MS Visio needs more time and I was running short of time. I would be continue working with it though this is the main point of GSoC.

GSoC polished me in true ways toward the Open Source development and I really loved working in this great program. I have planned to work on my own Open Source Software, you will hear soon at my blog. Taking part in Google Summer of Code was FUN and I really learned a lot of things from PMA. I have got all the money from Google 🙂 and waiting for t-shirt and Google certificate now.

My Code have been merged into the main repository of the PMA and I have uploaded it to the Google Project Hosting. So, anyone who wants to see what I coded can download the code (listed as Adnan_Mughal.tar.gz) and download the development version of PMA and play with the Export Relation Schema stuff. You would really love the work and use it in your projects demonstration. It would be helpful for students as well who need to present the structure of their databases.

hi folks,

Last week of coding have been finished and I found VERY  interesting things while working on EPS and MS Visio XML Schema’s.

EPS Schema Export

As you know I had installed xampp in Ubuntu. So, I could install PS PECL Extension to code EPS files. But damn, I got stuck while PECL INSTALL PS  package in xampp. I tried again a lot of forums/tutorials to get that working in xampp and put a lot of time on these issues. I also contacted PECL developer mailing lists and they suggested me to remove xampp and install lamp on ubuntu. So, I removed xampp and installed lamp but again I got the errors again while compiling PS PECL at Ubuntu. Someone at PECL developer mailing list suggested me a key point and here it is

apt-get install libgd2-xpm-dev

pecl install ps

Actually, PS library have dependency to isntall libgd2 first and then install PS but PS package doesn’t have this dependency listed at their website. After having such issues I finally got PS PECL installed in lampp and I started to code EPS schema. Remember, my main concern to use PS PECL was to calculate the width of the string in EPS. but when I generated a test Post script file I noticed some Interesting things.

First let me tell what is EPS:

An EPS file is a PostScript file which follows the DSC and which follows a couple of other rules. These rules can be summarized as follows:

• The first line must be %!PS-Adobe-3.0 EPSF-3.0
• The file must make use of the BoundingBox comment
• The file should be a single page image (in DSC terms, the %%Pages comment must have a value of 0 or 1).
• The file should not use any operators which affect the global state.

PS PECL is actually generates a post script file not Encapsulated Post Script file. This is what I noticed that PS lib is not what I required or wanted and what I was messing with it around from previous couple of weeks to get it working 🙁 I misunderstood or guess that PS Lib will solve the problem I have.

So, I reversed myself and continue working with manually creating EPS files using Commands by following the above mentioned points. Though there are some limitations according to my knowledge but I have done my best and I will continue to work on it in future too.

MS Visio XML Schema

Generating Visio XML .VDX is really a challenging task and due to a limited time I left after messing with EPS. I would not be able to completely implemented it and get it 100% working. But I have done as much as I could do so far.

Visio XML needs a lot of study of XML Schema’s of Visio 2003 and 2006. I also consulted visio forums and visio MVP’s to know more about the XML generation of Visio XML outside of VISIO IDE tool. I gathered a lot of information and stuff but It needs more time to get it complete. The main reason is VISIO save the  files in XML .VDX  but it creates a lot of XML that we need ages to know. So, to create files outside of Visio and using php langauge we need complete knowledge of XML Schema of Visio which I have started exploring. I will keep in touch with these schema’s and would give time as much as possible to cover it in future.

There were lots of obstacles on my way to get some things working perfectly and I didn’t got success but this leads me to road of success !!

hi,

This week was very disappointed for me because my health was broken and 5 hours of work took more than 4 days to complete 🙁

I had decided to go with manually creating EPS files by using POST SCRIPT commands. I had started very good but when I had to calculate the width of string I got stuck there and I realized that I must need to use PS Extension [0] to calculate the width of string. But there was no DLL for my wamp installation. So, I had two options. Create DLL or use the Linux and install PS Extension [0] and then use it. I am a windows user. So, I  decided to install Ubuntu in my Virtual Machine.

I tried to install Ubuntu 101 times at my laptop and on my pc as well but I didn’t got success at all. After being mad with its installation I downloaded the ISO image of Ubuntu again from their website and burned it on CD and then install it again. Luckily, It has been installed at my laptop in Virtual Machine and now I will code EPS Schema using PS Extension [0] after installing.

while I was frustrated with the installation of Ubuntu. I also tried to create DLL myself by using compilers of VC++ 2005 and 2008 version as well. But It took a lot of time in installation and configuration and again no success. I consulted a lot of forums but nothing 🙁

So, I am now working with Visio XML generation plus installing the xampp in Ubuntu now. I will try my best to finish both these two Schema’s till next Sunday.

[0] http://pecl.php.net/package/ps

hi,

9th week  is gone  and I explored XML for MS Visio Schema, EPS Schema format and issues for making PDF, SVG and Dia Exports downloadable. I had coded pdf,svg and dia exports that these will be prompted for download. It was working on my local wamp installation but not on demo server. Unfortunately that issue is still not resolved and after putting a lot of time on it I forget it and moved on.

For EPS schema, I found php extension pslib but unfortunately its DLL is not available. Though I can use this extension with Linux environment but I decided to use hand coded lib for Encapsulated Post Script files. Lots of information notes are available here  http://www.tailrecursive.org/postscript/eps.html about Post Script documents plus programming commands. So, I am going to code it from Monday.

For MS Visio Schema, I consulted MSDN and will code the library class for generating its XML schema like I did for SVG Schema.

Hope for best !!

Regards

Adnan

Hi, I am very delighted that I have passed the mid term evaluations of my project. So far, I have done PDF, SVG and DIA export relations schema’s. SVG and DIA export is done by using  [0] extension of php. It was not easy to use that library because there was not much support tutorials or documentation available even at [1]. But I worked hard on it to make it work finally. [0] gives us a superb support when we have to write/generate long length XML files. Continue reading “Google Summer of Code: Mid Term Evaluations”