Beginning bloggers can often be recognized by their fixation on web server statistics. I don’t mind admitting that I’m no exception. It’s just as satisfying to see that people read my ramblings, as it is to see people use a computer program that I wrote. Besides, the stats can show you some very interesting information, like which posts are popular, and what other sites refer people to this blog. But what’s most intriguing, is the search words some people used that lead them here. With some search words I really wonder how they could have led here, and if the posts here ever gave people the answers they were looking for. (Then again, I guess that’s the beauty of the web: you usually find what you’re looking for, but more often you find ten other things you weren’t after but are still interesting enough to look into.)

For example, how about the person that asked his search engine of choice, literally, “did sauerkraut come from switzerland?” Why did they want to know? Was the answer ever found? Does it really matter where it comes from? Personally, I would say straight away: sauerkraut comes from the Alsace region in France. The best sauerkraut I’ve ever tasted, anyway. But sauerkraut is eaten in many places, and many varieties. In Holland it’s usually mashed with potatoes, baked lardons mixed in, and served with smoked sausage. We had braised cabbage in Slovenia, which looked a lot like sauerkraut but wasn’t sour at all. According to Wikipedia, sauerkraut originated in China. Strange, it’s never on the menu at the Chinese takeaway’s…

Sauerkraut-like cabbage on the Ljubljana market

Continue Reading »

BEA’s Bill Roth (vp of the BEA Workshop Business Unit) hinted at JavaPolis and later in his blog and a LogicCMG blog at the possibility of WebLogic server supporting other languages than Java, like PHP or Ruby. I think this is an interesting idea. If, for instance, Ruby or Rails applications could be deployed to a WebLogic server, maybe you could use data sources or JMS queues from within Ruby code, or even call EJBs. You could profit from WebLogic’s scalability. Another advantage I see is that with BEA ‘supporting’ Ruby, it would be much easier to use Ruby in a corporate environment (that is, if they use BEA in the first place). BEA, bring it on!

(Note that I’m silently ignoring the mention of PHP here. Mentioning PHP and Ruby together does not do justice to Ruby; too many people I speak already think Ruby is just another PHP variant. I think BEA would actually lose credibility if they were to support PHP.)

Among today’s fashionable buzzwords in web development is Ajax. Fortunately, when you’re using the BEA WebLogic Portal framework, it’s easy to add a bit of this hot new technology to your application. For a project I did this year, we used the JSON-RPC-Java Ajax implementation. To use JSONRPC(JavaScript Object Notation remote procedure call protocol), you drop the downloaded jsonrpc.jar in your application’s APP-INF/lib directory. This library contains a servlet that will catch and process your Ajax actions. You’ll have to configure the servlet in the web.xml (see the detailed instructions). Then it’s up to you to do some JavaScript coding.
Continue Reading »

The BEA WebLogic Portal netui framework offers a useful method of creating and handling web forms. I’ve come to like how easy they are to use, specially with the Workshop wizards, one of the few advantages of using Workshop. I also like how you can put almost anything in a form class, like an XML bean generated class, and make their fields available on the form using the X-script notation (but why not EL!?). However, in the project I did in 2005 for a client, the time came when we were saying “I wish netui:textBox could do this, and netui:anchor could do that…” And although there’s not much to extend within the realm of JSP’s, tags are a noteworthy exception.

So we started to extend quite a few netui tags. Unfortunately, there was virtually no documentation to be found on this subject on BEA’s site or elsewhere on the Internet. The tag classes do not come with any apidocs either. Therefore, the first step was to decompile the tags we wished to extend, in order to uncover their internal workings. Having done this, I believe there’s no way you’re going to extend these tags without decompiling them. There’s just too much going on inside. Once you’ve figured this out though, it’s fairly easy to add your own stuff.
Continue Reading »