RL050 Pimp My Scriptengine with Jens Bruhn

Radio Liferay

Wow, 50 episodes already. At this year's Devcon I spoke with Jens Bruhn. He's Software Architect at Prodyna AG, a Liferay Partner and the author of Nabucco Script Center, a Liferay App available on the Marketplace. He also convened the "Pimp my Scripting Engine" workshop at Liferay's Devcon 2015, which I missed. But this only provided a perfect reason and excuse to speak to him.

As we recorded this on site at Devcon, you'll hear more background noise than usual - As usual, Auphonic did their best to clean the recording, and they did a great job.

For the visuals, please see the screenshots in this article as well as the plugin's homepage.

Here are some of the topics that we talked about:

• The Elevator Pitch: What's Nabucco Script Center?
• Scripting in Liferay: The native script console, its use and its shortcomings (solved in NSC)
• a short demo of Script Center. It makes sense to check the screenshots alongside, or even install the plugin:
  • various scripts (for example: Reset Terms of Use Acceptance) and instruct content editors to execute this script whenever they change the actual Terms of Use Article)
    
  • Automatically run scripts (again, same example, this time executed automatically on every update of the article) - comparable to a model listener plugin for Liferay's Service Builder
    
  • Scheduled Script execution. And basic sanity checks: When deactivating user accounts, you might want to have a few exceptions to your rules, e.g. in order to not lock out administrators that can help you gaining back control, but are not logging in every day.
    
  • Prodyna has scripts available on the app's homepage - e.g. What happened during the last 24 hours? How many users logged in yesterday? Basic data on usage on the start page ("heartbeat"). Warn authors in time before review dates of their content. Assign permissions based on categorization of content.
  • Fine grained permissions can be granted per script, e.g. just because you're able to upload/edit a script you might not be able to execute it - and vice versa.
• Feadback required - is this useful and what else is needed to make it more useful?
• How to develop without and with Script Center - where can it help you in your development process. Here are the slides that we talk about:
  
  
• Best Practices when implementing features in scripts: It's easy to accidentally make mistakes - there should be some basic safeguards.
• Script Center offers a third option to two customization approaches mentioned my earlier blog article