Vector Thrusting in Ferrari
Ok, the post title is misleading, just so that my absurd effort sounds cool. What I did was make a fat matchstick-vector-ferrari-fan. I know, sheesh.
This is a gross devaluation of Illustrator's capabilities, and also of my potential. ;) I used to think that the pen tool was a pain, but then I saw this really old video on youtube, in which John Warnock demonstrated the capabilities of one of the earliest versions of Illustrator, and the ease with which he used it caught my fancy. As you can see, I have caught on!
More vector art thrusting its way through to you in the future!
Labels: Adobe, Print, Software
Connecting to Adobe Share using Python
Adobe recently launched the Share Beta, a state of the art flash based file sharing and archiving solution. All of these services are headed in only one direction, the web. Also, there is an increasing desire to make connecting to these services easier. Adobe Share uses the RESTful paradigm to allow users to connect to the back end and communicate with the server, for automating tasks that would usually require user interaction.The Share forums currently provide links to API's for connecting to the service in Java and Action Script 3. I am not comfortable with either, and I wanted to use Python for this purpose, because it fits in well with my wider objective, and hence I can script everything in a single language. After hours of frantic searching, I wasn't able to find a decent tutorial on the RESTful methods in Python, leave alone Adobe Share specific help.
So after much hard work, I was able to get the responce I wanted, and after several ugly monsters like
'BadSig'
'BadAuthQuery'
and several others, I finally saw the light, and the server said:
'<response status="ok"><authtoken>2a5b93f2321a78172062219ab8ce3f25</authtoken></response>'</blockquote>
aah.. isn't that pretty.... You will surely understand if you have been trying as hard as I had to. So this is the end of one (no not all, its not panacea, just a lil blog, whatdayaexpect!) of your woes. This post will describe the very basics of getting a AuthToken using the Adobe Share API from Python.
So lets get started,
First things first, what all do you need over and above the standard Python installation? Only httplib2. (I use Python 2.5.1, and that seems to have everything else for this task anyway).
Import all you need, and create the data string and signature as described in the Share API documentation:
>>> import time, md5, httplib2
>>> shared = "085960468662212c21417dce2e1XXXXX"
>>> datastring = "POST /webservices/api/v1/auth/ apikey=fdc464509d733be99c30c6ccfacXXXXX calltime=" + str(int(time.time()))
>>> datastring
'POST /webservices/api/v1/auth/ apikey=fdc464509d733be99c30c6ccfacXXXXX calltime=1192904962'
>>> sig = (md5.new(datastring+shared).hexdigest())
>>> url = "https://api.share.adobe.com/webservices/api/v1/auth/?apikey=fdc464509d733be99c30c6ccfacXXXXX&calltime=1192904962&sig=" + sig
>>> bodydata = '<request><username>vkapoor@adobe.com<password>XXXXXXX</password>'
>>> http = httplib2.Http()
>>> response, content = http.request(url , method='POST', body=bodydata)
>>> response
{'date': 'Sat, 20 Oct 2007 18:33:18 GMT', 'status': '200', 'content-length': '88', 'content-type': 'application/xml;charset=ISO-8859-1', 'server': 'Apache-Coyote/1.1'}
>>> content
'<response status="ok"><authtoken>156e799bf4cac31eee170c2116cf5646</authtoken></response>'
So, there. Thats the first step for establishing a connection with the Adobe Share server, using Python and the RESTful approach. I will soon update on setting up a session, and uploading a PDF using Python. Stay tuned..
Labels: Adobe, Python, RESTful, Share, Web
You-Tube@Home
Have you ever wondered what technology powers You-Tube, Google Video, all the live streaming Videos on the net? Yes, it is Flash. Now Adobe lets you take that technology home for free. Download the Flash Media Encoder Here, and get any of the free flash video players to view it. It is an amazing light weight option even for putting up videos in your intranet websites. Many Open Source CMS solutions like Joomla have free components that support flash video.Go ahead, enjoy the freebies.. :)
Labels: Adobe
