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Category Archives: Web

Java PURL (Personalized URL) Generator encoder/decoder example

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Have you ever noticed the unscubscribe url pattern when you unsubscribe from an online promotion or retail marketing campaign? It looks something like this: www.somesite.com/unsubscribe/u/NSFAHPF/aW5aaW1pdHk Ideally, you would want the user to click that (personalized) URL and the system should automatically unsubscribe, or perform any simple non-secure operations like registering for a poll. How would [...]

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CAPTCHA Overview and alternatives

Monday, March 9, 2009

I recently evaluated CAPTCHA for a client requirement. Here is a brief overview (Source: blogs, wiki, white papers found on google search) CAPTCHA stands for: “Completely Automated Public Turing test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart”. It refers to a technology familiar to anyone who’s registered on a popular website – the “what word is [...]

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Grails Startup Pain

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Grails is a composed of a stack I like, a combination of technologies I’ve enjoyed using over the last few years- Groovy, HSQLDB, Spring, Hibernate, etc. And the whole seems greater than the sum of its parts, so while I’m complaining about it today, I do so knowing that with future releases Grails could really [...]

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Circumvent the firewall; access web-mail through pop3 using HTTP

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Ever want to be cool and check your web-mail at work without having to go to the stupid bulky web client to do it? There are several ways around this. Some providers, like gmail provide pop3 access. However, many do not, and even if they do, most corporate firewalls block you from using it. However, [...]

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Compare Sitemesh Vs Tiles, an overview

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

If you haven’t heard about the layout framework, Sitemesh which is based on the decorator pattern, you’re missing something in your webapp. Here’s a quick overview of both the Frameworks and obviously Sitemesh favors over Struts Tiles in a lot of ways. The Pros: Compatibility: Works virtually with all web frameworks while Tiles has limited [...]

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The Java PHP Connection

Friday, June 22, 2007

The JDJ* recently ran an article about Java-PHP Bridge projects – this is not using an HTTP server front end to route individual requests for PHP scripts or J2EE applications. The PHP or Java application can instead call the other without the HTTP server’s involvement. Here are the big three: PHP/Java Bridge The php/Java bridge [...]

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Server-side image drawing and jpeg encoding with AWT

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Recently I had an interesting problem to solve. A manufacturing client wanted to know if it was possible to dynamically draw images based on engineering and dimensional data provided by end-users, and show them on the Web. So, the first question I have to answer is. “Is this doable?” And my answer, as always, is [...]

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Holy Grail of CSS Layouts

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Jon Udell referenced this article yesterday in his blog, about the holy grail of the 3 column CSS layout. It’s amazing how illusive standards support is across browsers, despite the ubiquitous nature of the web today.

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The Regex Coach

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Need help with regex? Get the Regex Coach !!! Just saved my #$%^&…

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Creating HTML Change logs from Subversion

Friday, July 14, 2006

Change logs are useful for everyone, not just developers. The following script on this page can be used to transform a simple change log from Subversion into a nice html page that is pleasing to the eye. Subversion can output a change log in XML, which gives us easy access to manipulate its display. So, [...]

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