Raible Designs

Wednesday January 29, 2003

Cool Log Analyzer: AWStats Both Jeff and Anthony provide us with a tip to look at AWStats.

AWStats is a short for Advanced Web Statistics. It's a free tool that generates advanced web (but also ftp or mail) server access statistics graphically. This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information your log contains, in few graphical web pages.

This package looks very cool - and it's free, Free, FREE! I wonder if I can get my ISP to replace my existing stats software with this one. Posted in Roller at Jan 29 2003, 10:31:12 PM MST 1 Comment

The History of JSP Erik tipped me off that the JSP 2.0 Proposed Final Draft 2 was released. Too bad they don't show a diff of what changed between Draft 1 and Draft 2, or do they? Let me know if you know of such a feature. I did, however, find a little history on Java Server Pages that might be of interest. This excerpt below is from the PDF.

Historical Note

The following individuals were pioneers who did ground-breaking work on the Java platform areas related to this specification. James Gosling’s work on a Web Server in Java in 1994/1995 became the foundation for servlets. A larger project emerged in 1996 with Pavani Diwanji as lead engineer and with many other key members listed below. From this project came Sun’s Java Web Server product.

Things started to move quickly in 1999. The servlet expert group, with James Davidson as lead, delivered the Servlet 2.1 specification in January and the Servlet 2.2 specification in December, while the JSP group, with Larry Cable and Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart as leads, delivered JSP 1.0 in June and JSP 1.1 in December.

The year 2000 saw a lot of activity, with many implementations of containers, tools, books, and training that target JSP 1.1, Servlet 2.2, and the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition. Tag libraries were an area of intense development, as were varying approaches to organizing all these features together. The adoption of JSP technology has continued in the year 2001, with many talks at the "Web, Services and beyond" track at JavaOne being dedicated to the technology.

The JSP 1.2 specification went final in 2001. JSP 1.2 provided a number of fine-tunings of the spec. It also added the ability for validating JSP pages through the XML views of a JSP page. JSP 1.2 also introduced a normative XML syntax for JSP pages, but its adoption was handicaped by several specification shortcomings.

JSP 2.0 is a major revision of the JSP language. Key new features include a simple Expression Language, tag files, substantial simplifications for writing tag handlers in Java and the notion of JSP fragments. JSP 2.0 also includes a revision of the XML syntax that addresses most of the problems in JSP 1.2. Tracking the industry in a printed document is at best difficult; the industry pages at the web site at http://java.sun.com/products/jsp do a better job.

Posted in Java at Jan 29 2003, 10:21:18 PM MST Add a Comment