I’m a Mac user, but my development environment at GTRI is all Windows XP. I used to be an XP user, so this was ok, but I really want to be able to use my Mac as well for development. I had previously setup Synergy on my laptop to share my mouse and keyboard with a Linux box I had at home, but hadn’t used it since I upgraded to Leopard. I needed to setup the Windows XP box has the server and the Mac as the client. Leopard seemed to hate Synergy at first, but after a quick Google search, turns out it can’t be run in the background.. so it needs the -f flag:

synergyc -f [host address]

Once this was setup, it worked great. Thanks Synergy!!

Update: When transferring keystrokes over a network, the client machine’s packets could easily be sniffed leaving a huge security hole if you’re doing anything with sensitive data using synergy. The software does not have authentication or encryption, but synergy has addressed this issue with a nice work around. http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/security.html gives all the steps needed to encrypt/decrypt the packets on behalf of synergy using ssh.

I am developing a data entry / search application for GTRI and I ran into a problem when asked to highlight search keywords in the results text. The database is able to ignore case on the query, but I wanted the results to be highlighted while maintaining the original case of the text, i.e. capitalized, uppercase, lowercase, etc.

JSTL provides uppercase and lowercase functions, but no capitalize. I finally found the tag library for capitalize after a google search: http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/doc/string-doc/

I followed the instructions for configuring my application to use these tags:

Follow these steps to configure your web application with this tag library:

• Copy the tag library descriptor file to the /WEB-INF subdirectory of your web application.
• Copy the tag library JAR file to the /WEB-INF/lib subdirectory of your web application.
• Add a <taglib> element to your web application deployment descriptor in /WEB-INF/web.xml like this:

<taglib>
  <taglib-uri>http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/string-1.1</taglib-uri>
  <taglib-location>/WEB-INF/string.tld</taglib-location>
</taglib>

To use the tags from this library in your JSP pages, add the following directive at the top of each page:

<%@ taglib uri="http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/string-1.1" prefix="str" %>

where “str” is the tag name prefix you wish to use for tags from this library. You can change this value to any prefix you like.

These instructions posed a few questions:

1. Where is the tag library descriptor?
2. Which tag library jar file?

After many errors and an exhaustive google search, I found everything I need.

Step 1: Add taglibs-string.tld to your /WEB-INF/ folder
Step 2: Add string-1.1.0.jar to your /WEB-INF/lib folder
Step 3: Add the following element to your /WEB-INF/web.xml file:

<jsp-config>
  <taglib>
    <taglib-uri>http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/string-1.1</taglib-uri>
    <taglib-location>/WEB-INF/taglibs-string.tld</taglib-location>
  </taglib>
</jsp-config>

Step 4: Add the taglib tag to the jsp pages needing the string tags:

<%@ taglib uri="http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/string-1.1" prefix="str" %>

After this implementation I was able to use the capitalize string tag.

According to AWStats, a fair amount of people visit my blog, so I think I need to update it more often. Now that I’m sort of “in the groove” with summer classes and work, I’ll be sure to do that.

Classes

I’m taking 2 classes this summer, ISYE 3770 – Statistics and Probability and CS 4235 – Intro to Info Security. So far statistics is a little tough and info sci is more reading than anything.

Senioritis

Yap! I’m finally a senior. Four years and $25k in debt later!! But, it’s not over too soon. I have decided to attend grad school barring I receive a tuition waver from GTRI. I’m really enjoying working at GTRI. I’m learning a lot there and I work with a lot of really smart people. Something my past internships did not offer. I hope everything works out and I can go to grad school at Tech while working part time at GTRI.

Web Development

I recently finished another website. I will add it to the portfolio once it’s completed. Speaking of the portfolio, my site is still under construction. Since I’m only taking 2 classes this summer I’m hoping to finish the portfolio site up.

I am creating the website in rails, but my server has an odd way of allowing a site to be setup in rails. I originally had to move the entire public_html directory into a higher directory called rails, but this cause a lot of issues with apache rewrites for non-rails sites. So, I moved the public_html directory back to its original location and left the portfolio site where it was. I will figure out how to make the site show up properly once I get to that point. Need to finish developing it first.

Until next time…

Yahoo!
Rasmus Lerdorf has been giving talks all over campus during Yahoo! Hack Week. Luckily he was able to pay my CS1332 class a visit as well. Who is Rasmus Lerdorf? He is the father of PHP. He basically built it completely from the ground up for the first two releases and has since been working at Yahoo!. I was really excited to hear him speak mainly because my first language was PHP and I’ve been developing web applications in PHP around 5 years. He began the talk with a breakdown of how Yahoo! is able to use many servers to accomplish one task. His example was Yahoo! mail. The mail application is comprised of has many servers and each of these servers is responsible for some small aspect of the application. There is a cluster of servers that handle the deletion of mail, a cluster that handles sending, moving, etc. It was really interesting to hear how large scale web applications are able to handle the billions of hits they receive a day.

PHP vs. RoR
Rasmus also spoke about PHP and how it is able to easily parse XML files and integrate AJAX components into web pages. But, when he was taking questions, I asked if he had worked with any PHP frameworks. I asked because I noticed the job market for web developers seemed to be calling for more framework programmers (ie. Ruby on Rails, CakePHP, JSF). Also, I have used most of these frameworks and noticed that everything they accomplish I can do in PHP. So where’s the advantage if one exists?

Well, frameworks make it easier to develop applications that are redundant. If I need a CRUD application that allows me to post things on my blog, rails accomplishes this in minutes, whereas in PHP it would take some time (for me anyways). So he basically said he hates general purpose frameworks. I’m being harsher than his actual words were, but I did get a sense that he really didn’t like them. He said Yahoo! uses frameworks for their mail apps, their searches, and many other applications that they server on the web. But, of course, these are not general purpose frameworks, they are custom designed to suit Yahoo’s needs. He said frameworks like RoR are good for smaller sites, but it would be very difficult to allow the application to spread its work to multiple servers for parallel processing because of the MVC structure they take on.

In conclusion, the talk was very insightful, he did speak about some of the history of PHP, which was really interesting, and also his own background. Thank you Rasmus!

So now I’m stuck on some issues. Should I move forward with framework programming: RoR, CakePHP, JSF, or should I develop well rounded PHP / MySQL / Javascript skills to really take control of dynamic AJAX web application programming? The website I’m building is in Rails because the job market for Rails is HUGE! But, will this die down? Maybe I should just focus on becoming a systems programmer?