WildFire Update - fix is in progress for Facebook feed issue
Mat Newman July 24 2010 07:53:20
I wrote recently about the dangers of IBM including third-party plug-ins in Notes. The plug-in I mentioned at the time was Facebook. Well that one's reared it's head again - but this time it's a Notes fix that has broken calls to Facebook using the API, rather than the Facebook API itself breaking.Andrew and I have been working on the issue encountered by the Facebook feed subscription in WildFire! when running Notes 8.5.1 FP1, FP2 and FP3.
It appears to be the Facebook API instantiating a connection object by opening a connection, and then a few lines later making another Open call, the offending lines are here:
| conn = (HttpURLConnection) serverUrl.openConnection(); /*and a few lines later...*/ conn.connect(); |
This is linked to the following:
+SPR# MDEN82WK77 - Fixed a problem when using the same XPD Http URL connection object. This problem leads to a Protocol Exception with Java agents and plugins. This regression was introduced in 8.5.1 FP1.
Essentially, the SPR fixes the issue by ensuring that only one connection object is active at one time, therefore the Facebook API breaks by connecting during instantiation, and then explicitly calling a .connect again later in the routine.
Resolution:
Andrew spent some time recoding WildFire! to execute Facebook calls without using the Facebook Java API. As a result, creating the connection object the same way that the API calls it - without the second .connect call - appears to have fixed the problem.
We have been alpha testing on FP1, FP2 and FP3 on Windows, Linux and Mac and early results look good. We need to add in a few more functions with our own code, but we have removed the Facebook API from WildFire! which has reduced the size of the plug-in quite a bit. Following some more testing and feature enhancements to our own Facebook code we will release an update.
Note that this issue is not encountered by users running WildFire! in Notes 8.5.1 without any fix packs applied.
Watch this space...
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