Blog Entries

Just a quick tip about xsl which I haven’t found anywhere else…

I wanted to generate some human (well me) readable XML using XSL and found that if you add xml:space=”preserve” to the opening tag, then, at least if you are using Xalan and Java to do the transformation, it will preserve the spaces between the tags in the XSL and you’ll get something more or less readable. (more…)

We recently had what sounded like a simple job to do: produce a questionnaire in several languages including Russian and store the results in a MySQL database. Now I could have chosen PHP to produce the questionnaire, but I thought that using Java resource bundles would be the easiest. I knew that using the JSTL fmt: tags we could do fmt:message and pull the messages out of a resouce bundle so all I had to do was get the translators to take the english property file, translate it and hey presto! Java knows about Unicode right into its core, so it would all work wouldn’t it.

How wrong I was! (more…)

I was reading something about a new OS called Inferno. (See Inferno.)

At first sight it’s an OS designed for ease of building cross platform distributed systems. There’s nothing new in that of course, but it looks like a decent attempt at doing everything in one place. The website’s got “screenshots” on there though which seems a bit odd to me in that it equates “OS” with “user interface” which rather loses sight of the core issue. (more…)

I’m just trying to write a SAX parser for the XML log files generated from the Logging API if you use the XMLFormatter.

There are a couple of problems with the XML generated. One is that the XML is not well formed until the log file is “completed” because it doesn’t have a final </log> element (not surprising really). (more…)

I’m running Tomcat on a windows box and I want to use Windows/Domain users and groups to control access to web application pages. So far I’ve thought of a number of different approaches, but none of them are quite right yet. (more…)