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There was a lot of buzz at JavaOne regarding the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Basically, GWT allows a developer to write a AJAX powered web application in Java!! The Java code gets ‘compiled’ to a set of plain old text files containing your JavaScript code. For example, the GWT will translate your rollover actions written in Java to JavaScript functions. This confused me for a second so I’ll stress again that you compile your web application written in Java to plain old JavaScript and HTML that can run in any browser.

What this means is that if you are a Java developer you don’t have to learn JavaScript and all the idiosyncrasies of every browser to develop a stable and reliable AJAX web application.

To get started download the GWT from Google, configure it with Eclipse, and create a new web application.

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• 10 things I learned about using Hibernate/JPA successfully by SpencerUresk - I decided to share a few things I learned about using Hibernate/JPA in a large project with a complicated database setup
• OpenJPA no longer requires bytecode processing - Historically, OpenJPA required that you either run a post-compilation tool or run your application with a javaagent. The latest build of OpenJPA removes this restriction by providing various levels of support for unenhanced classes.
• Google Docs vs. the Hassle of Microsoft Office and Friends (by Jeremy Zawodny) - I’m simply not going to bother with the hassle, trouble, expense, and complexity of desktop applications when an online substitute will do the job anymore. Life’s too short already.
• Java EE 5 Blueprints (JPA) - The Java BluePrints projects presents guidelines and examples for designing enterprise quality applications and web services using Java technologies. Topics Ajax-enabled Web 2.0 applications, Persistence, JavaServer Faces, SOA with BPEL, and WS-Security.
• Agile Ajax: 36 GWT Tutorials - While the excellent GWT in Action was released last month, there are lots of people that want to get their feet wet before plunking down $50 for a book. To that end, I’ve pulled together all of the GWT tutorials I’m aware of.
• Javablog » Tips for writing FaceBook applications in Java - So you want to write a FaceBook application using Java? Here are some tips to help get you started
• How to build a breadcrumb with Spring Webflow 1.0.4 - In this tutorial we explain how to create a simple breadcrumb with the new Spring Webflow framework, arrived at 1.0.4 version, released the 26 June 2007.
• Gorilla Codes » Blog Archive » 3 Useful CSS background-image Tricks - The background-image and its related properties exemplify this school of thought, enabling many techniques that extend the boundaries of what is possible with the browser technology of today.
• Interview with James Ward: Flex from a Java Perspective - O’Reilly ONJava Blog - I recently had a chance to talk to James Ward about Adobe Flex. I started out by asking him about Cairngorm The Cairngorm Microarchitecture is a lightweight yet prescriptive framework for rich Internet application (RIA) development.
• Flex Friday Feature - Datagrid Component - The datagrid component is one of the most versatile and used UIComponents in the flex environment. After this tutorial you should have a good grasp on how to use the datagrid component and what can be done with it.
• Java Web Services, Part 3: Axis2 Data Binding - This article shows you how to use these different data bindings with Axis2 and explains why you might prefer one over the others for your application.

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This tutorial talks about easy field validation with Prototype.

I wanted a robust javascript validation library that was simple to implement and didn’t require me do any extra work other than creating the form. My favourite idea for a method of doing this is to utilise the field elements’ class attribute to indicate what sort of field it is and hence any validation requirements.

There are a few javascript libraries that implement that idea like wForms, but, since I’m currently hell-bent on re-writing all my javascript using Prototype, I thought I’d see how difficult or easy it would be to roll my own. Turns out that this is just the sort of thing that is easy with Prototype.

Demo of field validation using prototype

Download the code used in Demo

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• The 90th percentile: MyFaces: The emperor has no clothes - My last project is going into production in a couple of weeks, and it has been implemented using JSF. I started with JSF in good faith: it should be stable by now, it is blessed by Sun and included as the de facto web framework in JEE 5.
• James Ward’s Blog ? Blog Archive ? My Recent Flex & Apollo Adventures - A while back Bruce Eckel and I recorded a screencast of us building a Flex application with Hibernate and XFire on the backend. I finally got around to packaging the code for that demo. You can get it from SourceForge.
• rakaz - Make your pages load faster by combining and compressing javascript and css files - Thanks to a small PHP script and some clever URL rewriting I now have an easy to maintain method to speed up the loading of pages that use many or large css and javascript files.
• Vitamin Features ? Serving JavaScript Fast - The next generation of web apps make heavy use of JavaScript and CSS. We?ll show you how to make those apps responsive and quick.
• lightWindow - Another decent lightbox Javascript library (via Ajaxian) - After researching every single modal window, lightbox, slimbox, etc out there nothing fit the bill. Granted some of them were very nice but only fit a specific purpose
• Dynamic languages: More than just a quick fix | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2007-04-16 | By Andrew Binstock - IT’s rise to prominence as a core competence that delivers competitive advantage has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the number of software development projects it must complete
• Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Rails Developer David Heinemeier Hansson?s Response to Alex Payne?s Interview [dive into mark] - LAUGH OUT LOUD funny take from Mark Pilgrim, John Gruber style.
• Wordpress Performance: Why My Site Is So Much Faster Than Yours by Elliott Back - There?s no good reason for Wordpress or your site to be slow, except your own negligence. Cache everything. Monitor performance
• Tim Sneath : Introducing Microsoft Silverlight - Silverlight (previously codenamed “WPF/E”) is a lightweight subset of XAML for building rich media experiences on the web.
• Java Community News - BEA Releases JRockit R27.2 with Java 6 Support - BEA’s latest JVM release, JRockit R27.2, is the first implementation of the Java 6 VM. In addition to providing full Java 6 support, the latest JRockit VM includes many-fold performance improvements, especially for applications with short-lived objects.
• Enomalism : XEN Virtualized Server Management Console: Amazon EC2 Migration - The Enomalism Elastic migration module is a migration tool kit for the management and migration of virtual images between your local xen based enomalism environment and the remote Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Environment.
• Everybody Hates Don Imus - Frank Rich’s brilliant column - Even in that short span, there?s been an astounding display of hypocrisy, sanctimony and self-congratulation from nearly every side of the debate
• Dev2Dev Online: Open Source and BEA - BEA believes in open source. We believe a blended strategy for application development and deployment?combining the best of open source and commercial software?provides important freedom and flexibility not available through all-or-nothing approaches
• Web Worker Daily ? Blog Archive Web Worker Emergency Survival Kit ? - Over the years, I?ve accumulated a variety of tools that don?t take up much space but that come in handy when an emergency comes along. On the average day, I don?t need any of these - but when I do, I?m happy to have them. Here are my suggestions

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In this tutorial, you will learn that How to build an Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) Really Simple Syndication (RSS) reader, as well as a Web component that you can place on any Web site to look at the articles in the RSS feeds.

The first thing I thought about doing when I read about requesting Extensible Markup Language (XML) from JavaScript code on a Web page was to get some RSS and display it. But I immediately ran into the security issue of XML Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), where a page that comes from www.mysite.com can’t address pages from anywhere other than www.mysite.com. My plans to build a generic RSS reader in just the page were dashed. But Web 2.0 is all about ingenuity, and solving the problem of how to create an RSS reader with XMLHTTP teaches a lot about how to program the 2.0 Web.

Download the code for this tutorial

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Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a new paradigm which was introduced in 2005. The purpose of Ajax is that of giving the illusion that websites are responsive. It achieves this by processing requests which involve the sending and receiving of small packets of data without refreshing the web browser.

Ajax is founded on:

XHTML - A rigid subset of html which is used to mark-up and style the information.

DOM - The Document Object Model which can be accessed by the client browsers.

XMLHttpRequest - The object used to exchange the information asynchronously.

XML - The format used to transfer the data from the server to the client.

In this tutorial we will see how to create a piece of text that keeps changing using Ajax. Before you start this tutorial make sure that you have a text editor and a web server with PHP extensions available. The following section explains the source files, why they were created, and how to deploy them.

Download Sample code used in this tutorial

Watch the Demo

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First off, it’s not as hard as you think! These directions are for the popular Apache web browser but odds are pretty darn good that’s what server you have anyway! if not, then a quick google of “adding a 404 error page” coupled with the name of your web server will probably do the trick!

Step One: Modify the httpd.conf file

The first step, and perhaps the most challenging, is to find your Web server configuration file - often called httpd.conf - and find the block of statements that define the location and behavior of your particular site. This file is commonly found at /etc/httpd/httpd.conf, /usr/local/www/conf/httpd.conf or a similar location: if you can’t find it, ask your system administrator. On a typical server configuration, it might look like this:

<VirtualHost www.example.com>
ServerName www.example.com
ServerAdmin admin@example.com
DocumentRoot /usr/local/www/example.com
ErrorLog logs/example/error_log
TransferLog logs/example/access_log
</VirtualHost>

Your server might have dozens (or more) of these VirtualHost blocks in the configuration file: make sure you find the one for your exact domain name before you make any modifications. Now that you’ve found this section, you need to add an ErrorDocument handler that specifies the exact numeric code and the name of the file to serve up (or CGI script to run) when that error is encountered. Here’s how that might well look:

ErrorDocument 404 /errordoc-404.shtml

In this case, when error 404 is encountered - page or file not found - then the file errordoc-404.shtml will be served up (and notice that you can have server-side includes (SSI) in error documents if you’d like. One trick, though, is to remember that error pages can pop up anywhere in your site heirarchy, so make sure all your graphic references, links to other areas on the site, etc, are absolute references, that they start with ‘/’ or, in extreme cases, ‘http:’.

Note: There’s another way you can hook a custom 404 error page into your site too, using a .htaccess file, as explained in How to use .htaccess to create a custom 404 error page .

Step Two: Create the 404 Error Page

There are lots of different error 404 pages you can create, ranging from the succinct and dry to the peculiar, to the witty, to the super-helpful (for example, you can easily add a google search for only pages from your site to your 404 error page ).

Whichever path you choose, you’ll find people appreciate if you at least offer a link to your home page and some method whereby they can contact you if they are insistent that certain material should be present but isn’t.

Also, most people agree that not insulting them is a good strategy, but, perhaps surprisingly, this varies and there are definitely some 404 error pages out there that are quite blunt.

It depends on the style of your site, your sense of humor, and whether you want to err on the side of “useful” or on the side of “amusing”.

Step Three: Restart the Web Server

To get the change to the configuration file accepted, you’ll probably need to restart or otherwise nudge your Apache Web server so it knows that you’ve added a custom 404 error page (otherwise it’ll continue to blithly serve up the generic error page instead).

There are a couple of basic commands to accomplish this task:

1. apachectl is most common,
2. or you might need to revert to a custom script like restart_apache,
3. or tools like Webmin have a restart option,
4. or, if this all seems like too much work, just ask a sysadmin to restart the server.

Regardless of which you choose, it’s always a good idea to also check the log files for the Web server to ensure that everything was accepted and parsed without any errors. On a typical Linux/Unix configuration, the log file would be at

/var/log/messages

because Apache (almost always) is configured to use the standard syslog mechanism.

Once that happens, type in a URL that you know isn’t present on your site and see what happens! If everything is correct, you should see the new 404 error page pop up.

If it doesn’t work, go back to your httpd.conf file, identify where errors are logged (probably an entry ErrorLog) then look in that file to see what’s wrong.

Most likely you have a naming error where it’s called one thing in the configuration file but something else on the actual server.

If everything is working fine, try a second 404 error by requesting a page that’s a few subdirectories into the site, so while for your first test you may have used something like http://www.example.com/badpage this time try something more like http://www.example.com/some/subdir/badpage

If all the graphics are displayed properly and the links to elsewhere on your site are all correct, congratulations! You’ve done it! You’re now the proud owner of a custom 404 error page.

If not, step through this tutorial again, keeping an eye on the error log file, and you should have this figured out in no time.

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We hear a lot about “Web 2.0″ these days. It sounds neat and it’s trendy to talk about blogging and social media. But does it really affect our businesses? Is Web 2.0 just for kids and tech-hipsters or is it something we business owners should use to help promote our businesses?

I can’t tell you if Web 2.0 is right for your business but I can tell you it’s something to be aware of Ignoring it means ignoring a possible tool that could be valuable in helping you get more customers.

So, to help you get started in thinking about Web 2.0 for your business, here are some things for you to consider.

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I can’t help it. Even though Safari has a nicer looking UI, and the most recent Windows update is leaking memory like a sieve, I keep running Firefox as my primary Web browser. Why? Because no other browser has managed to give me anything like the extensibility story that Firefox extensions bring to my daily web working experience. With thousands of extensions out there, your list may vary, but here’s my own selection of half a dozen essentials:

Available at WebWorkerDaily

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As it seems Fox News left their image directory open… means, publicly indexed… and most of the images are no better than your common image macro. This is something a webmaster never should do. But, I think their webmaster just took out on holidays. ;) Yep, end of July… But…. But…. maybe this is another political trick.. Remember; Presidential Campaign? Who knows. This is just my oppinion. Those days I can really think of anything. There are a lot of images there; personally didn’t had the time to check them all, but, be sure that someone welse will do that for us all.

So, again:

What is one of your bookmarks?

http://www…………………………………………….. (fill in)

Mine?

Sure: http://www.foxnews.com/images/root_images/

Update: It is not only the root image directory… a lot of other directories;
Check by yourself:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=mozclient&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=site%3Afoxnews%2Ecom+intitle%3A%22index+of%22

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