Maybe you know Bewise, Vertice's sister company, fully specialized on Microsoft technologies.

For the fourth consecutive year, Bewise organizes in Toulouse (France) a free technical conference with the participation of Vertice.

Vertice will be happy to welcome you on its booth to present Nova 2010 Range, on April 1, 2010.

If you are in Toulouse on that date and if you love rugby (*), please register and come see us.

(*) The event will take place in the Ernest Wallon Stadium (Stade Toulousain headquarters).

Vertice wanted to thank you all for coming to meet us at Imagina 2010. Here are some photos of the event. Enjoy!

Vertice will propose in the coming weeks 2 internships. One oriented 2D/3D graphic and the other developer-oriented real-time 3D.

So if you love art, the challenge and if you want to reach our team during an internship (and possibly more if affinity), drop me an email at fredATvertice.fr.

Incidentally, the intership will be paid and will take place in Toulouse (France). I know that passion does not care this kind of detail, but it's better when it's said!

In fact, if you're interested, don't forget that an interview should be prepared ...

You should know that Nova 2010 range will be launched at the beginning of the second 2010 quarter. This version will be the largest in terms of new features we've ever made! Here are the first four unveiled:

• DirectX 10 and shader 4.0 support
• New engine for real-time shadows
• Nova Web Player view: support IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome
• New formats for importing files from 3D software (.fbx, .dxf, .x, .obj, .3ds, .dae)

More news soon!

Imagina 2010 is the international 3D Market for professionals. The event will take place in Monaco from February, 3th to February, 5th. The Vertice Team will hold the stand I27.

Feel free to come talk with us on the topics of interactive 3D and Nova 2010 range we will present in beta at the time.

Moreover, my team is working on a video that will run on the stand and will present some achievements of our customers. If you want to be virtually on the Vertice stand, send me your scene (contact me at fredATvertice.fr). Among those received, we will choose the 3 best (graphically and technically) to include them in our video.

Hope to see you at Monaco in early February.

In my last post on this subject, I suggested that deploying MySQL ODBC drivers on client PC was not a good design. I spoke about Service Oriented Architecture or more specifically about Rest Services. There will be so many things to write about SOA and Rest Services but it's not the subject. I will just technically describe how I created a Rest service that returns records from my MySql Database.

First of all a small architecture picture:

In my sample, a Web Site on IIS is exposing REST Services over HTTP. These services expose data from my database called "bCatalog" and specifically from my table tProducts. The return data are xml formatted, more specifically in an atom format. Data may be accessed through specific urls such as:

• "http://localhost:2522/ProductService.svc/tproducts: get all records from the table "tProducts". I highlighted the important tags in resulting xml document:

• "http://localhost:2522/ProductService.svc/tproducts('Box01WithLabel')": get the specific product from de table "tProducts" where "objectID" (the primary key) is equal to "Box01WithLabel".

In the solution you can download (at the end of the post), you will see I used two Microsoft technologies: ADO.NET Data Services to create Rest Services and ADO.NET Entity Framework to request data from my sql database. Moreover, this time I used the managed MySql driver you can download here.

The next step was to update my Nova Script in VB.NET to request data on http. So I just proceeded as follow:

• I replaced my database Connection String by a simple URL to request all data from "tProducts" table.
• I completely rewrote the existing "LoadObjectsFromDatabase" method to take into account an http query. Technically, the .NET Framework offers all you need to make http requests and to interpret resulting XML data. The class to use to request is "HttpWebRequest" and the class to use to manipulate XML is "XmlDocument":

The harder task was to manipulate the atom XML Document. I lost a couple of minutes thinking why my xpath request (to get all entry tags, i.e. database records) didn't return anything. In fact, it was quite simple! Indeed, in atom format, there are default namespaces that must prefix all tags. The rest of the job was just finding nodes, route nodes and gatting and storage of values (database fields).

So, with this solution, my database is no more directly exposed to the web and especially I have not to deploy MySql ODBC drivers on each client. In the following zip, you will find:

• the mxb file I used,
• the corresponding nss file,
• the nsr file that contains the previous scripting in case,
• MySql database scripting.
• the web exposing Rest Services (you will need Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to load the project)

VerticeSample-Last.zip (66.48 kb)

Enjoy!

Let me know if you are interested with the code to load data only on user interaction (with cache store) by leaving me a comment for this post. Moreover if you have any questions about SOA, please contact me.

It's now time to analyze the solution. We do not yet know very well (joke), but when I see a code or an architecture, I used to have a critical eye over. I confess that it is the same for the code I produce. So, here are my thoughts about the developed solution:

• Deploying MySQL ODBC driver may be acceptable for an small intranet solution but is not acceptable for a full web compliant environment.
• The direct use of a database from a Web Plugin may be dangerous for the database server since it forces administrators to openthe firewall for a specific port. That's unsecure and it's not the state of the art even if we place the database server in a DMZ. So we should use secured Web Services or Rest Services, i.e. on a standard protocol (http or https). this is what is called a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).
• It will be better to only store the url of the services layer on http instead of a connection string. Url that can be set by the http server that manages the Web Page including the web plugin tag object.
• I use the root account to access the catalog that I use to store my information. It's dangerous from a security point of view. We should use a dedicated account with less privileges.
• You'll notice in my script, I hard stored the culture to format the price. On the other hand, we should not make this as a dynamic part since in my database I store Euros and not Dollars. And with the price of the dollar right now, it won't be interesting, except if we manage changes according to the user culture.
• If you take a look at the database schema, you will notice it is simplistic. Indeed, products may have more data such as categories, keywords, etc. and we should use an integer as a primary key to perform powerful tables joins.
• The last thing is the way to load once all data from database. What happens if data change in the database after web Plugin loading? Well, nothing in fact because data are not collected when the user interaction is executed.
• Last but not least, the Web Plugin had to be updated to reference the missing "System.Data.dll" assembly to access "System.Data.Odbc" namespace. This update will be available soon with Nova Explorer auto-update.

Well, you are going to tell me that I coded with my feets ;-). In fact I responded directly to a need that I have been asked for. Moreover, any script may always be improved with time. I develop this solution in a couple of hours (in fact 3 hours). This partly explains it... Now I will attach myself to do things in the rules of art, anyway, as I believe they should be :-)

So in my next post I will show you how to develop a REST Architecture to expose my data and to consume it in a Nova script.

See you soon!

Well, last but not least post on this topic, let's use this scene with differents clients.

• Nova Explorer, certainly the most used:

• A specific Windows Form application that use the .NET Web Player control:

• The Web Plugin inside Internet Explorer:

The first step is to generate the mxc and the html files by using Nova Explorer Publish menu:

Then, you have just to open the generated Html page:

Just one more thing like will say a friend of mine: since the trust does not exclude some form of control, below here are of the database contents I used.

In my next post, I will talk about architecture and specifically the one that is induced by this complete sample. In other terms, I will talk about its pros and cons.