[Chrome Extension] "Pack your link" extension on the store by enree.co (yes, thet's me...)

I'm not a marketing guy, I neither have requested advices from my marketing guys friends...I did it all my way and that's why my brand new Chrome Extension will be forgotten in days!

Let's start from the beginning...

Once upon a time there was a simple Chrome Extension I made at work for WebResults, my Company: you will hear about it in weeks, but not now.

After weeks of testing we decided to put it in the market but I didn't now how to do it (I know, there si plenty of stuff online, but I don't trust myself till I see things done!...that's why because sometimes I behave like Goofy when dealing with simple tasks!!).

So I thought, "How can I do a clean job for my company without making foolish mistakes"?

The answer was "Create your own extension".

That's why I created url.enree.co (I love this domain name), a simple Url packing utility hosted on Heroku, written in NodeJS.

Why not creating a simple chrome extension to use this service?

Here you are Pack your link by url.enree.co.

Publishing a Chrome Extension on the store is really easy.

1. Create your extension (start here if you don't know what to do, it's easy and fun)
2. Go to the Chrome Store Developer dashboard: you have to pay 5$ to be able to publish your creations on the store, once in a lifetime! In few minutes you'll be allowed to publish extensions and apps.
3. ZIP your local extension's folder and upload it: it seems that you cannot remove a product once uploaded (read more details here, but I'm not quite sure about it), but you can still unpublish to hide it.
   

See ya!

[Github / Maven] Maven repository using GitHub

This simple post is a reminder on how to create a Maven2 repository and use it with Maven in a "pom.xml" file or in Java Play!.

The first step is to create a GitHub Repository (it will be named "maven2").

Then reproduce the folder structure of a Maven Repository, as I did in my "Maven2" repo (https://github.com/enreeco/maven2).

For instance, given this artifact (jar):

<groupId>com.rubenlaguna</groupId>
  <artifactId>evernote-api</artifactId>
  <name>Official Evernote API</name>
  <version>1.22</version>

Create these folders:

./com
     ./com/rubenlaguna
     ./com/rubenlaguna/evernote-api
     ./com/rubenlaguna/evernote-api/1.22
     ./com/rubenlaguna/evernote-api/1.22/evernote-api-1.22.jar
     ./com/rubenlaguna/evernote-api/1.22/evernote-api-1.22.pom

Now you have a pubblicly accessible Maven2 repository at https://github.com/[username]/[repoName]/raw/master/ (in my case https://github.com/enreeco/maven2/raw/master/).

To consume it in your projects, just add this lines in the "pom.xml" file of your project:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" 
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    <groupId>com.echoservice</groupId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <artifactId>echoservlet</artifactId>
    <repositories>
    <repository>
      <id>myRepository</id>
      <url>https://github.com/enreeco/maven2/raw/master/</url>
    </repository>
    </repositories>
    <dependencies>
 . . .
 </depencencies>
 . . .
</project>

To integrate the maven repo in a Java Play! project (necessary if you're messing with Heroku), take the "/prject/Build.scala" file and add those lines:

import sbt._
import Keys._
import PlayProject._

object ApplicationBuild extends Build {

    val appName         = "evernote-integration"
    val appVersion      = "0.1"

    val appDependencies = Seq(
      "com.rubenlaguna" % "evernote-api" % "1.22", //Evernote Thrift Library
      "com.rubenlaguna" % "libthrift" % "1.0-SNAPSHOT",//Thrift core library
      "postgresql" % "postgresql" % "9.1-901.jdbc4", //Postgres
      "org.apache.httpcomponents" % "fluent-hc" % "4.2.1" //Apache HTTP client
    )

    val main = PlayProject(appName, appVersion, appDependencies, mainLang = JAVA).settings(
     resolvers+= "personal maven repo" at "https://github.com/enreeco/maven2/raw/master/"
    )

}

Maven will search for the selected jars in the default locations, but when it's not finding anything it will search for your personal resolvers.