I have a message for those people – you don’t have time not to learn!

I will agree that most training is not 100% new content and often, if you’re knowledgeable and experienced, there is very little that’s new.  Yes, some of the time in any training session is wasted, and it would be nice if that wasted time could be avoided.    Still, in my experience, there is always a kernel of wisdom derived from training, and that kernel justifies the whole effort.  That’s happened to me time and again.

Have you heard the old adage about marketing – 50% of marketing dollars are wasted, but how can you predict which 50%?  Kernels of wisdom are picked up in unpredictable ways.

At Snowbound we believe greater understanding brings on greater success.  If our customers learn more about our products, they will be more successful and faster in implementation and use.  Our greatest failures occur when a customer is unwilling to read the manual or ask for help, and then doesn’t manage to build their application correctly.

We continue to brainstorm how to best help our customers.  Here are our latest offers for VirtualViewer or RasterMaster assistance:

a)    Implementation assistance via webconference – Four hours free with orders over $10K or with the purchase of 5 days of professional services.

b)    Installation or configuration assistance via webconference -  Same as above

c)    Product training -  Same as above

Professional services hours can be applied to any of the above services or for custom development.   On-site training or installation services are available at extra cost.

Our goal is your success.  Please take the time to let us help you.

*  Offer subject to change without notice after 30 days from the date of this newsletter.

Simon Wieczner, CEO

So why do so many of our customers complain about the cost and complexity of supporting hundreds and thousands of client stations with so many applications? They tell us they want to get away from multiple viewers. Why? Well, primarily because of that word multiple. Too many choices, too many interfaces, too many dependencies, too much training and too much cost.

Enter the universal viewer – a simple solution that takes care of everything. Your worries are solved. … Unfortunately it’s not that simple. There are trade-offs. You’ve got to know what you’re doing and what to expect. TIFF and JPEG have been around a long time. We’ve been developing with them for a long time – I doubt that anyone does it better than us.

PDF was originated by Adobe. No one does it better than they do, particularly when they control the spec. But some of us do a very good job.

MS Office – same story as PDF. Invented and advanced by Microsoft and no one does it better than they do – most people don’t even dare to try; again some of us do a good job with it.

So first takeaway – if you’re not using the Adobe Acrobat Reader or Microsoft Word, expect some differences, some trade-offs for the benefit of having a universal viewer than solves your complexity, training and cost issues.

Performing document and image viewing efficiently and economically is a relatively transparent process, once configured correctly – but many people don’t realize that setup is key.

What do I mean by set up? Learn more here.

As always, I welcome any comments you may have. Address them to pres2009@snowbound.com and I’ll personally review and respond.

Simon Wieczner, CEO

For this setup, I used PostgreSQL v8.3.0 with the JDBC3 PostgreSQL Driver v8.3-603 and ran the VV servlet under Apache Tomcat v6.06. Instructions for installing PostgreSQL with vary depending upon your platform of choice, but there are plenty of setup guides to be found– I personally find it easer to setup and interact with databases up under Linux Since the content handler will later be built against the JDBC PostgreSQL driver, I found it helpful to build this from source for debugging.

The default content handler shipped with VirtualViewer can be easily extended to save binary data into a PostgreSQL database using the saveFileBytes() and getFileBytes() methods. By default, this is where the file I/O occurs for all documents and metadata in the content handler. Instead of going to disk, we use JDBC calls to access a table in our database and retrieve the appropriate content.

Step 0: Get PostgreSQL or your DB of choice installed and all that good stuff.

Step 1: Create new table in the database to hold our documents and metadata. I choose to associate both with the bytea data type, so I created a table like so:

CREATE TABLE images (imgname text, img bytea);

Step 2: Create custom content handler. I created an insertViaJDBC() method to be called from saveFileBytes() which took in a file name and byte[] array to be inserted into the database:

DataInputStream dis = new DataInputStream(
new ByteArrayInputStream( filebytes ));
PreparedStatement ps =
conn.prepareStatement(“INSERT INTO images VALUES (?, ?)”);
ps.setString(1, filename);
ps.setBinaryStream(2, dis, filebytes.length);
ps.executeUpdate();

Likewise, I created a fetchViaJDBC() method to be called from getFileBytes() which took in a file

PreparedStatement ps =
conn.prepareStatement(“SELECT img FROM images WHERE imgname=?”);
ps.setString(1, filename);
ResultSet rs = ps.executeQuery();
if ( rs != null ) {
while( rs.next() )
filebytes = rs.getBytes(1);
rs.close();
}

This all standard JDBC code adapted from the manual pages. PostgreSQL can store binary data in two ways, with either the binary bytea data type or the large object feature. I did not implement the large object feature, but depending upon your document imaging needs, you should choose accordingly.

Step 3: Modify the servlet web.xml to point to your content handler. This is the only change to the web.xml you must make, but I also added in parameters for the database such as username, password and hostname. These parameters can then be referenced via your content handler and used in your JDBC methods. In my case, I grabbed these parameters in my content handler init() method. I also removed parameters for filePath and overPath from the web.xml since my content handler isn’t going to disk anymore for documents.

If you’ve implemented the content handler this far, you’ll noticed you’ve got a few problems wit annotations when you try and use it. This is because you’ll need to devise an alternative method for handling annotation layer names that doesn’t depend on file I/O. It’s fairly straightforward, basically just moving from files to String when you’re dealing with document paths. I ended up changing the method signature on both getFileBytes() and saveFileBytes() to accept a String for a file name instead of a File object– this also made for handling JDBC calls a little more logical.

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