Web development

Is Groovy a good way to pass complex data from one server to another (instead of JSON or XML)?
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I’ve been using JQuery for a while now and really agree with its tag line that it’s the “The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library”. We’ve also got this code for dragging and dropping table rows that has proved very popular, so it seemed natural to combine the two and wrap up the table drag and drop as a JQuery plugin. (more…)

We’re creating a web application that asks a number of questions about pumps (as it happens). Some of these questions are typical yes/no questions. But we need to make sure the user makes a positive choice. We don’t want to impose a choice on them. Which controls would you use?

Here’s the question with the three options we’ve currently got:

Jakob Nielsen at useit.com in his article Checkboxes vs Radio Buttons tells us that radio buttons are used “when there is a list of two or more options that are mutually exclusive and the user must select exactly one choice” and a single checkbox is used “for a single option that the user can turn on or off”. But this case is a little special since we don’t want the user to forget to select something. The nice thing about using the radio buttons or the drop-down is that you have a way of detecting if the user has actually chosen anything yet. On the whole though, the drop-down list is probably the least user-friendly though perhaps the easiest to generate programmatically.

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(This poll is a great WordPress plugin developed by Lester Chan)

We have several web applications derived from the same code base and as well as sharing the jars in WEB-INF/lib, we provide set of administration pages to allow users to configure and administer the applications. Until now, we’ve always had to make copies of the admin pages and this has caused us configuration headaches as we try and make sure that all the applications have the latest versions of all the pages.

But now I’ve finally managed to work out how to make Tomcat follow symbolic links—and it’s very easy! (more…)

This article describes how we used Groovy to create a DSL for the clauses in a rules engine. We have been collaborating in the development of an “expert system” application for KnowledgeBench Ltd. This application uses a forward chaining rules engine to provide a “smart” system capable of creating formulations in domains such as pharmaceutical tablet formulation, inhalers, paints, food & drink and cosmetics. (more…)