What to do

Create your icon as a 57×57px PNG file and put it in a publicly accessible location on your server (you don’t need to create round corners the OS will do this for you). Then add the following code inside the head tags in your page:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="[PATH_TO_ICON]/webclip.png" />

Now when you save your page as a webclip this will be the icon that’s used on your home screen. Additionally if you want to remove the effects added by the OS, namely 3D borders and reflective shine, use the following:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="${rc.contextPath}/assets/images/webclip.png" />

Cineworld Mobile (iPhone) Geo Location

UK cinema chain Cineworld launched their new mobile site on 11th September 2009. The launch of Cineworld’s mobile initiative is in response to the fact that 4% of cineworld.com’s total 1 million weekly visits are via mobile.

Can Factory designed and built the site to allow customers to browse film times or cinema details from the Cineworld chain, whilst also reading film synopses and booking tickets securely. The site is simple, functional and integrates seamlessly into Cineworld’s existing website and back-office systems.

The mobile site developed by Can Factory is compatible with today’s leading handset providers, including: Apple iPhone, Blackberry, Google Android, Windows mobile, and Nokia’s Symbian OS. In addition, Can Factory’s solution ensured that each handset’s unique user experience and functionality was taken into account and leveraged wherever possible, e.g. integrating the mobile site with iPhone’s location based services for cinema searches.

Cineworld Mobile (iPhone) Film

Kristy Quigg, Cineworld’s channel marketing manager, said, “Here at Cineworld we are constantly searching for new and innovative ways to communicate with our customers. Our new mobile site supplements our central website in an effective way, providing up-to-date content which you can access anytime, on your mobile.”

The mobile solution will become an integral part of Cineworld’s online communication offering. It will allow the brand to meet particular marketing objectives including, increased communication between customers within the 15-24 year age group as well further developing an interactive relationship with customers to establish brand loyalty.

Warren Kerrigan of Can Factory said, “Allowing users easy access to the site’s QuickBook functionality, and working with a wide variety of handsets, this new application makes use of advanced mobile features. It’s a simple way to find film information and book on the move.”

The bespoke Java solution designed and built by Can Factory, integrates with both internal legacy and external third party systems and suppliers, e.g. Clarity Commerce, Arcot, BT Buynet, BBC Customer Publishing. In addition, booking, and performance data is synchronised across all 75 of Cineworld’s cinema in real-time.

Can Factory’s solution included the provision of a bespoke Content Management System (CMS) to allow Cineworld’s internal teams to more easily leverage marketing and commercial opportunities.

Can Factory’s Technical Consultancy team also facilitated and managed a six-way ISP tender process, thereby helping Cineworld to significantly reduce ongoing hosting costs, and select a supplier who could meet increasingly demanding online traffic levels.

Subsequently, Can Factory worked with Cineworld’s IT team, and Carrenza (Cineword’s chosen ISP) to design a virtualised Unified Computing System solution that could support high-volume traffic surges without service-interruption. The final supporting application / architecture sustains the high level of scalability demanded by Cineworld’s business objectives, and has been load tested to serve over 500,000 visitors/day.
Vincent McGann, Cineworld IT manager, said, “Since it (the site) launched, we’ve been very pleased with the site’s performance,” he concluded that working with Carrenza, Can Factory had provided a solution to support Cineworld’s online needs “for many years”.

The first phase of the project took eleven months to complete from initial design specification to launch in November 2008. As well as providing day-to-day application support services, Can Factory continues to work with Cineworld’s Marketing, IT and Online teams to expand upon the existing functionality to ensure that Cineworld’s online applications are a market leader, both now, and in the future.

This success of the Can Factory solution has allowed Cineworld to take advantage of a number of partnerships and the site is seeing greater success than ever before.

Can Factory solution / technology:

• Bespoke Java application – Cinema times; CMS; Advance booking; e-commerce; User registration / Comms
• Bespoke Flash trailer player
• Mobile site

Third Party Integration:

• Clarity Commerce: ticketing and sales integration
• Arcot: Transfort 3D secure cardholder authentication
• BT Buynet payment gateway: Online transaction processing
• Experian: QAS Web Pro Address matching
• DDC Outsourcing Solutions: Gift voucher fulfilment provider
• BBC Customer Publishing: bespoke real-time film-data feed
• Text Marketer – SMS communication
• Web Trends – Site analytics

* Entertainment powerhouse – Cineworld Cinemas is one of the UK and Ireland’s leading cinema chains in terms of the number of sites, screens and admissions. Cineword has a portfolio of 75 cinemas and 775 screens.

With a standard discriminator, you need a separate column in this method to tell Hibernate what type of object can be found in this row. In some cases it’s easy to have this extra column but in some cases you don’t have the control you would like over the structure of the data in the database.

If you can’t have a separate discriminator column, you can use the @DiscriminatorFormula annotation to pass in a sql fragment that Hibernate will use to determine the class of a particular row of data stored with this method.

See the Hibernate Annotations reference on inheritance for more information.

Since Jetty is launched from maven we need to do the following:

1. From your prompt run the following command to allow you to connect to the application remotely.

Post JDK1.3.x
export MAVEN_OPTS=”-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=5005″

Pre JDK1.3.x
export MAVEN_OPTS=”-Xnoagent -Djava.compiler=NONE -Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=5005″

2. Go to IntelliJ and click on Run -> Edit Configurations. Then click on the + button followed by Remote to add a remote configuration. Make sure you are listening on the right port (5005) and click apply.

When you start Jetty from Maven you will see
Listening for transport dt_socket at address: 5005

Then you go into IntelliJ, choose the Remote configuration that you have just set up, and press debug. Now you can set breakpoints and debug the code.

Update 7th May: As it turns out, you can also run jetty using “mvnDebug jetty:run” which has the same effect. Just remember to choose the correct socket address in the IntelliJ configuration.

We moved. At first we didn’t want to. A break clause in our lease and a micro-market the opposite of what you’d expect in a recession meant that last Christmas we had three months to find a home as good, or better, than our place on Strutton Ground.

Formerly an i-level office minutes from Parliament Square, we used to go for a jog in St James’ Park (alright, a few of us …) or have lunch and shop on our street, one of liveliest, most varied little London markets.

It was time to go, so we reviewed what we’d like and went to look at premises with every level of fit-out, preferably with a 4Mb leased line.

In the middle of negotiating a move to W1 we were offered space by a friend and colleague – Bob Bingham of Push and Bingham and Bingham – with digital sales and marketing agency Ad2one, south of the river at Big Ben.

Part of County Hall, with a 100mb leased line, we’re on the mezzanine floor of a listed building in beautifully designed contemporary offices. This used to be a bank, complete with original strong-rooms and some old hand-written ledgers in the basement.

Around the corner is the London Eye and the cafés and restaurants of The South Bank, packed with close-up magicians, live music and moving sculptures at lunchtime. If the weather’s good we can picnic (or sunbathe) in Jubilee Gardens …

In retrospect the change was in our favour: We have better facilities now and a similar view – from a different angle.

Strutton Ground photo © Graham Horn (creative commons).

One of the items that I’ve struggled to find documentation on is how to store a collection of enums with Hibernate Annotations.

Lets say for this example that we want to have an object called CoffeeRoster. The purpose of this object is to record what days a person will be responsible for buying coffee and snacky things for the office. And in this object we will store the person’s name and a set of days.

@Entity
public class CoffeeRoster{
   @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO) 
   private Long id;       
 
   @CollectionOfElements
   @Enumerated(EnumType.STRING)
   private Set<Day> buyingDays = new HashSet<Day>();
 
   private String name;
 
   //default no args constructor, getters and setters.
}

Taking a look at that example, we have an annotation for the fact that this is an entity and we note that we have a generated value id field.

At the bottom you’ll see that ‘name’ doesn’t have an annotation. This is because if you don’t explicitly declare an annotation, Hibernate will try to store it by itself. If we didn’t want name to be stored in the database, we’d have to use the @Transient annotation to declare it as transient.

So on to the important bit about the collections…

@CollectionOfElements

The correct way to store a collection is to use this annotation. In the background, a table is created for us that will be called CoffeeRoster_buyingDays which will have two columns, CoffeeRoster_id and element.

Then you’ll notice the @Enumerated(EnumType.STRING). If you try this example without this line, the ordinal of the enum is stored in the database, but if you use this annotation, the name of the enum is used instead.

For example, in our database we can see the following:

It was also interesting to find that CollectionOfElements looks to be the way forward with mapping collections in general – (from Hibernate Annotations Reference Guide)

Previous versions of Hibernate Annotations used the @OneToMany to mark a collection of elements. Due to semantic inconsistencies, we’ve introduced the annotation @CollectionOfElements. Marking collections of elements the old way still work but is considered deprecated and is going to be unsupported in future releases.

This year’s campaign will see the tried and tested donation system rolled out to more call centres than ever before and will once again be providing the payment processing for the BBC’s interactive Red Button service, and the Sport Relief web site.

The system isolates payments from loss of database access or connectivity issues with the bank systems to ensure a seamless donation experience for the end user.

Visit the official website for more information on this year’s event – taking place on July 15th – at, sportrelief.com.

To find out more about the Can Factory payment queue system or any other e-commerce applications please contact us.

Working alongside the creative forces of Event Communications, Peter Key Sound Design and Adam Grater Lighting Designs for over a year, Can Factory managed the process of selecting and appointing specialist contractors for network installation and for the AV system. Drawing on existing partner relationships we were able to advise the client in all their technology needs.

Following the initial requirements analysis and highlevel design Can Factory completed, in consultation with architect Patrick Dillon and the Friends of Benjamin Franklin House, a detailed feasibility study for the installation of hundreds of cables around the house. Cables were then installed as part of the conservation works and Can Factory moved on to the task of selecting a team for the technical installation.

Technology partners included Cisco, BT Skynet, Sysco AV, Lutron and Bose. Software for the office and research centre network as well as individual workstations was donated by software giant Microsoft. The blend of technology used throughout the house is more than appropriate given Franklin’s forward thinking. In the words of Treasurer and Project Management Team Chair, Anne Keigher “The incredibly successfully opening of Benjamin Franklin House proves that Franklin is indeed timeless and that this most noteworthy project is also timeless and will continue to develop in perpetuity”.

The Historical Experience blends live interpretation, leading edge sound, lighting and visual projection to tell the story of Franklin in London. As the cornerstone to its success, the AV solution had to be robust and of high quality designed to deliver excellent performance and long term reliability. The solution comprises 7 RackBLADES acting as media servers for video content distributed around the house, Cloud Multi-channel Amplifiers, Alcorn McBride 8Traxx Digital Audio Players machines, Radio Design Labs audio combiners, an AMX Show Controller, Denon A/V Surround Receivers, Bose® speakers and the new to market lightweight Plus 339 projectors.

Multimedia specialists Sysco AV were a fabulous addition to the team providing excellent service throughout the project consistently going above and beyond in their endeavours to meet the deadline. Working in very limiting Grade I listed surroundings presented a number of challenges along the way but we worked together to ensure that these were overcome to everyone’s satisfaction.

Can Factory worked with partners BT SkyNet on the design and installation of the network for the house’s office areas and research facility. In addition to the design and installation of a Cisco based network solution BT SkyNet also provided excellent support to the client in provision of the required ADSL and ISDN lines at a cost suitable to the client’s needs.

Despite numerous challenges, many unique to working in a listed building environment Can Factory’s Technical Project Manager Hannah Mitchell kept the project on track and delivered the project well within the original budget and on time. “It was a unique challenge for me, and after over a year on the project it gave me great satisfaction to see everything come together on schedule” Mitchell said.

If you would like to know more about the Project Management and Technical Consultancy available at Can Factory please visit the Services section of this site.

To read more about the only remaining home of Benjamin Franklin visit the site at, benjaminfranklinhouse.org.

How often do you see a URL in your email that is so long it spans several lines and when you click on it the result is usually an error. These long URL’s that get broken in emails are very unforgiving for users and usually quite meaningless, most of the time being filled with a multitude of characters that are unintelligible to anyone except the web server to which they point. Being able to create shorter URL’s with more functionality and meaning to users, but still allow navigation to the original, is what condense.it is all about.

Can Factory were aware that there are already many existing services available on the Internet that provide this type of URL shortening functionality. However, support for additional features which made the service and user experience better was greatly varied. Taking evolution in its true sense we decided to create the best of the best. The approach was to make the service appear as simple as possible, but for users who wanted just that bit more to allow the use of features which would give them greater control over the URL’s that were created. Finding a balance between the simplicity we wanted and introducing an overwhelming array of features has led to us producing a user experience that everyone can get to grips with. But don’t take our word for it try it yourself at condense.it and tell your friends!

Since it’s conception it is now also available in several other guises, built using a framework principle, so that other services can tap into the wealth of features it provides. While being the first independent project Can Factory has released it also contains different technologies not used in our other applications. Developer James Whitehouse said “It was a great challenge using these technologies to create the features we wanted. Ultimately it was a very rewarding project for the development team and we are glad to offer this service to the Internet community.”

If you would like to find out more information about condense.it or use it within your systems please click on the relevant product page in the navigation opposite.