(I had to shorten the article title to fit!)
I’ve just had a problem when I’ve taken a web application from my local Tomcat 5.5 development server (where it worked fine) and uploaded it onto a public server (also using Tomcat 5.5).
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:
| Do you need a sealless pump? | |
| Do you need a sealless pump? | |
| Do you need a sealless pump? |
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.
Loading …(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…)
If you’re writing a JSP using the JSTL tag <c:catch var=”myError”> … </c:catch> then I’m sure that you know that the next thing to do is to check after the closing catch tag to see if myError is empty. If not you can output some useful error message having successfully caught any exception. However, sometimes it’s useful to actually output the stack trace (when debugging a site for example). It turns out not to be difficult to do this. Simply copy in the following:
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<c:if test="${not empty myError}">
<p class="error">An error occured: <c:out value="${myError}"/></p>
<pre>
<c:forEach var="stackTraceElem" items="${myError.stackTrace}">
<c:out value="${stackTraceElem}"/><br/>
</c:forEach>
One of the problems with using HTML as the user interface is testing it (in fact testing user interfaces has always been a bit of a problem) so I’m always on the look out for good UI testing tools.
For a while I’ve known about and used Watir which scripts Internet Explorer (and now Firefox with FireWatir though it’s a bit more tricky to set up). Watir allows you to write simple but powerful scripts in Ruby that will instruct IE to load up a page, fill in a form, click a button or whatever and then you can make assertions about what should have happened. It’s not difficult to use and even if you don’t know Ruby, if you know other languages, you can soon pick it up.
Today however I came across Selenium (also on the same OpenQA site). This is neat for two reasons: (1) it’s all written in JavaScript so the same script runs in both IE and Firefox, on the PC or Mac; and (2) it has an IDE (a Firefox extension in fact) which lets you record the tests rather than having to write them yourself (you can then save them away and create test suites; you can also load up tests and single step them, etc.). (There is a Watir recorder on the OpenQA site but it’s only version 0.1 so far. There’s also WET which I haven’t tested, but is a Windows application written in Ruby which wraps around Watir.)
The thing I’m currently looking for though is a test environment where I don’t have to install a large infrastructure and which works easily on both PCs and Macs, supporting both IE and Firefox. Selenium seems to give me exactly that. In fact the project’s customer could probably install it on their PC and be able to run the tests (or even record new tests) which would be great.
Please let me know if you know of other tools that would fit the bill or what your experience is with these tools.
