This is a class which is different than every other class you can find regarding coverting an email address to image.

This is because it uses the encryption of the email addresswhich is being passed to the script which renders the image. The renderer decrypts this parameter produces an image output.

One of the powerful feature of JSF is to extend its tag library and create custom tags. Developers can use this feature and enhance the tags that are provided by JSF implementations (e.g. sun, myfaces, etc). Or they can straight away start writing the tags of their own. Today we’ll see how easy it is to create a custom tag in JSF. Let’s try out with an example, to create a tag, which will display today’s date and a list of people who has birthday today.

I got the task to evaluate the new web-frameworks in the company I work for.  There were many candicates that might enhance the web user interface and move away from the old struts framework. If you want to know some of my experiences, just read on..

I've been struggling with creating my own icefaces tag that I could use everywhere it's needed. There are many tutorials on the internet, BUT.. I couldn't get it work anyway.

When I looked at the sourcecode on the webpage, the tag     <ticker:ticker />  was there directly in the HTML sourcecode. This is wrong, because I expected the rendered ouput there.

One whole week I tried to solve this problem trying almost everything. But then, finally, I found it.

So, what was the problem? When you are using Facelets with your JSF/Icefaces, the TLD (tag library descriptor) files are for nothing. Even if I tried to place them everywhere. You have to create the equivalent of the TLD file for the Facelets - the XML file describing the tag structure. In this case it's ticker.taglib.xml

 There you specify the component's class - Ticker, and it's renderer - TickerRenderer. Now, you don't need the TickerTag as suggested when using JSP in many tutorials around the internet.

    <context-param>
        <param-name>facelets.LIBRARIES</param-name>
        <param-value>
            /WEB-INF/ticker.taglib.xml;/WEB-INF/tomahawk.taglib.xml
        </param-value>
    </context-param>

 
JSF source with a custom tag

Rendered output

I wonder why this 'trick' hasn't been described yet in some tutorial. So, I hope you will find this remark useful and it will help you when creating your own JSF components.

I've been reading something about firefox extensions programming. There are many tutorials on the web showing just the basics - how to create the .xpi file, and describe contents of this archive. None of these tutorials showed something more about the XUL programming and theory behind it.

Check out these cool XUL presentations I found: 

http://www.xmlaustin.org/wk/385/4/Eitan_Suez_XUL.pdf

http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/04/04714158/0471415804.pdf

I found a great CSS dropdown menu on a website http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/drop_variation.html

It allows you to include the dropdown menu as one you can see on the top of this website. One great advantage is that it's in a plain HTML with the usage of CSS styling and therefore no javascript coding is required.

Ok, so I made a module that generates the set of HTML links from the Joomla CMS which are then transformed into this nice menu.
Every page of my website usually contains less than 100 links (internal+external) because I want the pages to be the search engine friendly.  But using this feature the number of links on every webpage increased to 200 or so.

Currently I am evaluating the Google Web Toolkit technology (GWT) for our project and I'm trying to compare it to other approaches like the ICEfaces technology from the Icesoft company.

If you are about to start with the google web toolkit (gwt), I can recommend you the following presentation from Intellij:

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/training/demos/GWT.html

It features the Intellij IDEA's support for GWT. I have to say here that working with GWT with IDEA is very easy and intuitive. IDEA's got lots of helpers, code generators, and error reporting. I was nicely surprised that IDEA hilighted the non-existing CSS style used with the GWT ! Creating the remote servlets is also a piece of cake! It registers your servlet automatically in web.xml and does other neat stuff.

UPDATE: Great presentation from the Prodyna GmbH:
http://jax.prodyna.de/jaxdocs/jaxgwt.ppt

UPDATE: GWT presentation video from Bruce Johnson:
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/gwt

To learn some theory - have a look here:
http://www.maximilien.org/presentations/2006/AJAX_and_GWT_Public_07052006.pdf

Read the whitepaper form the IBM:
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/dw/wes/hipods/Advanced_AJAX_with_GWT_wp16Feb.pdf

And a great presentation from javapassion.com:
http://www.javapassion.com/ajax/GWT.pdf

and it's version with the speaker noted there.
http://www.javapassion.com/ajax/GWT_speakernoted.pdf

I found the development with GWT quite easy, it's quite similar to the swing development with it's actionlisteners etc.. My task now is to create the form which would have it's fields expanded regarding to the role of the user that logged in. With icefaces it was the matter of an hour, GWT learning curve seems to be quite longer, but maybe it's because I knew JSF before. Anyway.. it's worth to have a look at these technologies, because they allow you to combine the AJAX and Java approach, without any painful javascript coding. If you'd have some experiences with the GWT, or other web technologies, feel free to comment ! Thank you

Check out this amazing 3D Flex demo: 

• Ctrl+Q - quick lookup in the Javadoc documenation. It shows up a popup box with the javadoc comment

• Ctrl+P - shows the parameters of the method. This is useful when you are not sure about parameters of the constructor or some method. It gives you the list of the all available parameters.

• Ctrl+B - go to declaration. If you are not sure where the variable is defined, this shortcut jumps to that place.

• Shift+F1 - View External Javadoc - opens a browser with the method in the javadoc

• private - accessible only from within it's own class
• protected - only to classes in the same package or subclasses of the class.
• public - from any other class

• abstract - cannot be instantiated, must be implemented by a nonabstract subclass.
• class - keyword that specifies a class
• extends - indicates the superclass that a suclass is extending
• final - impossible to extend a class, override a method, or reinitialize a variable
• implements - indicates the interfaces that a class implements
• interface - specifies the interface
• native - a method is written in a platform-dependent language
• new - instantiating, invoking the constructor
• static - variable belong to a class as opposed to an instance
• strictfp - will follow FP-strict rules in all expressions
• synchronized - method can be accessed only by one thread
• transient - prevents fields from ever being serialized
• volatile - may change out of sync

• break - exits from the block of code in which it is
• case - executes a block of code, dependent on the switch
• continue - begins the next iteration of the loop
• default - executes if none of the switch-case statements match
• do - conjuction with the while statement
• else - if an if test is false
• for - conditional loop for a block of code
• if - logical test for true or false
• instanceof - whether an object is an instance of a class, superclass, or interface
• return - returns from method
• switch - variable to be compared with the case statements
• while - repeats while a certain condition is true

• catch - declares the block to handle an exception
• finally - is executed no matter what program flow occurs
• throw - used to pass an exception
• throws - indicates the method will pass an exception
• try - block that will be tried, and which may cause an exception
• assert - evaluates an expression to verify the assumption of the programmer

• import - statement that says which packages or classes to import
• package - specifies the package to which the sourcecode belongs

• boolean - a value true or false
• byte - 8-bit signed integer
• char - unicode character (16-bit)
• short - 16-bit integer which is signed
• double - 64-bit floating-point number which is signed
• float - 32-bit floating-point number which is signed
• int - 32-bit integer number which is signed
• long - 64-bit integer which is signed

• super - refers to the superclass
• this - refers to the current object

• void - indicates no return type

• const - use public static final instead
• goto - not implemented !

• decimal
• octal - by placing the zero in front of the number (up to 21 digits)
• hexadecimal - by the prefix 0x or the optional suffix extension L (up to 16 digits)