July 2003 Archives

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CSS1 Test Suite

Jul 2

The CSS1 Test Suite is provided as a way for vendors and page authors to test their browser's conformance to the CSS1 specification.

Test suite can be found here.


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Standards

Back to School

Jul 6

W3Schools is a great reference site, it is structured like a reference library so it is easy to find the all important piece of information quickly.

Aswell as reference there are also many tutorials, which include basic HTML and XHTML, to advanced XML, XSL and SOAP tutorials.

References include:

- HTML 4.01
- XHTML
- CSS2


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Misc

CSS Filters

Jul 8

Use this table to discover if the user agent / browser can cope with the CSS rule, if it doesnt you could use it as a filter to tweak specific styles to certain browsers. (For example in the boxmodel hack).

http://centricle.com/ref/css/filters/


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Standards

An Open source project for EAI

Jul 8

Proteus

Proteus is a toolkit for message-based Enterprise Application Integration. It includes adapters for many different kinds of message sources and sinks, and a simple, but very capable message broker. The broker allows routing and transformation of messages from and to all the sources and sinks for which adapters exist. Transformations may be custom-written in Java or XSLT (the broker uses Xalan as its XSLT transformation engine).

Mappers can be used to map incoming messages onto other sorts of objects. These include DBMapper, which maps a message onto a JDBC prepared statement and TibcoMapper, which maps a message onto a Tibco message.

Check this open source project out here


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Netscape 6 and IE 5.5 have their DOM Differences

Jul 10

IE and Netscape have always had their differences, however the latest incarnations have brought both browsers much closer since the 4.0 days.

So what are the differences between Netscape 6's Document Object Model (DOM) and Internet Explorer 5.x's DOM.

A good example is the difference in modeling of the root nodes of the DOM tree, document and documentElement objects. Netscape 6 also models the ownership relationship in a document, while Internet Explorer 5.x does not. Another advantage of Netscape 6's DOM is its ability to model fragment nodes, which Internet Explorer does not support.

Article continued here at webreference.com


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Standards

Struts Explained

Jul 10

Struts is an open source web development framework that incorporates the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design paradigm. It builds on Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies.

The model part within the Struts framework are the Java server objects, which represent the internal estate of the application. Enterprise Java Beans are commonly used here.

The view part of Struts is constructed via JavaServer Pages (JSP) which are a combination of static HTML/XML, Struts custom Tags and Java.

The Controller are servlets which take requests (GET/POST) from the client, perform actions on the model and subsequently update the view by forwarding to the appropriate JSP.

The Athens Group have produced an informative whitepaper called 'Using Struts' and is definately worth reading if you are new to Struts.

Find out more about Struts at the Jakarta Apache site and from the lead developer at Husted.com


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Struts with XSLT and XML

Jul 10

Julien Mercay and Gilbert Bouzeid add an 'X' to the 'Model 2 / MVC' paradigm in this article from JavaWorld .

The article eXplains how we can, with a little tinkering, use XML/XSLT for the View in the Struts framework instead of using JSP.


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Remote Scripting

Jul 10

Today web sites are trying to become more and more like traditional applications, however the call-response-reload model used in HTTP transactions makes this concept difficult and clumbersome to implement.

Applets (browser plug-ins) were created to allow the developer to build these more complex client-side applications, allowing connections directly to the server, for example in the infamous 'chat' applet. However these applets are seen to be rather 'heavy-weight' and more often than not look drab on website.

In modern browsers we can use DHTML to create dynamic content from the server without having to reload a page.

This 'remote scripting' concept is introduced on the Apple developer website.

- Remote Scripting with IFRAME - Apple
- Remote Scripting with IFRAME - O Reilly
- DotVoid - Remote Scripting with javascript
- DHTMLCentral - Remote Scripting with javascript
- Remote Scripting Resources


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Scripting

Internet Explorer Margin Fix

Jul 11

In Internet Explorer 5.x and backwards-compatible-mode Internet Explorer 6 on Windows platforms, the automatic horizontal margins are not implemented correctly. Setting the various forms of automatic left and right margins has no effect on the desired element. This script will fix the bug in Internet Explorer without any modification to your HTML or CSS, making your pages display correctly. For more details, check out www.stilleye.com


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Standards

Wake up from hibernation

Jul 15

Hibernate is a powerful, ultra-high performance object/relational persistence and query service for Java. Hibernate lets you develop persistent objects following common Java idiom - including association, inheritance, polymorphism, composition and the Java collections framework. Extremely fine-grained, richly typed object models are possible. The Hibernate Query Language, designed as a "minimal" object-oriented extension to SQL, provides an elegant bridge between the object and relational worlds. Hibernate is now the most popular ORM solution for Java.

Here is a well documented walkthrough for anyone wishing to use Hibernate for the first time. There is also a quickstart guide at the hibernate website, and another at ideoplex.com


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Dynamic creation of Struts Form Beans

Jul 15

Developers familiar with Struts will understand the laborious task of creating Form beans required for part of the View component of struts. However within Struts 1.1 there is the option to use "DynaBeans" these are dynamically configured Java Beans, that are configured from a external source (usually XML) rather than by explicit methods defined in the class.

Read the article by James M. Turner and learn how to use DynaBeans today.


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Rich tags at OpenSymphony

Jul 20

One of the new beta developments at OpenSymphony includes a selection of JSP tags that create rich functional as well as good looking front-end components. It is hoped that this tag library will create a set of graphical widgets that can be embedded within web pages, somewhat similar to the GUI toolkit SWING.

This is a project I will be monitoring closely as it is similar to what I’ve been wanting to create for a while now. It will be interesting to see if the widgets created are cross browser compatible and XHTML standards compliant.


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Java and the Web

Jul 21

The following articles document a brief discussion on Internet technology and the facets that make up Server side and Client side programming. The articles are slightly dated however are still interesting reading for the beginner.

Articles include the following, Client/Server computing, Client-side programming, Java and ActiveX, Security, Server-Side Programming, and Comparing C++ and Java.


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