Currently viewing the category: "Web development"
ImageButton

Image buttons made simple

By On June 5, 2008 · 8 Comments

I read a blog post recently showing how to create a button with an image and text. The button looked very simple and very nice to look at, but the HTML was more complicated than I thought it needed to be.

There is a move now to make the HTML of a document as simple [...]

Continue Reading →

Groovy Interchange Format?

By On April 29, 2008 · 6 Comments

Is Groovy a good way to pass complex data from one server to another (instead of JSON or XML)?

Continue Reading →

Table Drag and Drop JQuery plugin

By On February 20, 2008 · 880 Comments

I’ve been using JQuery for a while now and really agree with its tag line that it’s the “The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library”. We’ve also got this code for dragging and dropping table rows that has proved very popular, so it seemed natural to combine the two and wrap [...]

Continue Reading →

Poll: A yes/no question in a web form, which control(s) would you use?

By On February 6, 2008 · 7 Comments

We’re creating a web application that asks a number of questions about pumps (as it happens). Some of these questions are typical yes/no questions. But we need to make sure the user makes a positive choice. We don’t want to impose a choice on them. Which controls would you use?

Here’s the question with the [...]

Continue Reading →

Following symbolic links in Tomcat

By On January 24, 2008 · 16 Comments

We have several web applications derived from the same code base and as well as sharing the jars in WEB-INF/lib, we provide set of administration pages to allow users to configure and administer the applications. Until now, we’ve always had to make copies of the admin pages and this has caused us configuration headaches as [...]

Continue Reading →

Groovy, DSLs and Rules engines

By On January 18, 2008 · 1 Comment

This article describes how we used Groovy to create a DSL for the clauses in a rules engine. We have been collaborating in the development of an “expert system” application for KnowledgeBench Ltd. This application uses a forward chaining rules engine to provide a “smart” system capable of [...]

Continue Reading →

Internet Explorer caches Ajax pages, and how to stop it

By On November 9, 2007 · 3 Comments

Caching pages leads to a speedier browsing experience and so is a good idea. Replacing information within a web page using Ajax similarly improves the user’s experience. The problem comes when the browser caches the information from the Ajax request. It’s a logical thing to do, but it’s not normally what the developer wants.

There [...]

Continue Reading →

Firefox has overtaken IE on our site

By On October 29, 2007 · Leave a Comment

.browsers th { background-color: #eee; } .browsers table { width: auto; } .percent { text-align: right; }

I’m afraid that I don’t know exactly when it happened, but looking at our web-stats (produced by AWStats), the top ten browsers used to access our site are as shown below. It’s not representative of course, [...]

Continue Reading →

Plesk, Apache, Tomcat and multiple hosts

By On October 5, 2007 · 1 Comment

In addition to having problems with JNDI not working properly, I’ve also been bashing my head against Plesk–that is supposedly “designed to simplify the management and administration of web sites”.

It’s the interaction between Plesk and Tomcat that’s the particular problem and how both of them negotiate dealing with multiple domains (or rather don’t deal [...]

Continue Reading →

Outputting stack traces in a JSP using JSTL

By On October 3, 2007 · Leave a Comment

If you’re writing a JSP using the JSTL tag <c:catch var=”myError”> … </c:catch> then I’m sure that you know that the next thing to do is to check after the closing catch tag to see if myError is empty. If not you can output some useful error message having successfully caught any exception. However, sometimes [...]

Continue Reading →