Raible Designs

Monday April 07, 2003

Cool JSTL Trick I didn't know this, but JSTL's Expression Language is smarter than I thought. It is actually able to interpret the following expression:

<c:when test="{bodyId == ('login' or 'about')}">

As you can plainly see, this is much easier than the long way I was writing my expressions:

<c:when test="{bodyId == 'login' or bodyId == 'about'}">

Cool! (I removed the $ before bodyId to make Velocity happy.)

Update: False alarm - this doesn't work like I'd hoped. The long way seems to be the only real way to make this logic work. Posted in Java at Apr 07 2003, 11:51:08 PM MDT 1 Comment

Tomcat FAQ I stumbled upon the Tomcat FAQ project at SourceForge today. Actually, someone from the tomcat-user list (that I can't unsubscribe from) pointed me to it. Looks like a great reference for the Tomcat users of the world. Posted in Java at Apr 07 2003, 05:20:29 PM MDT Add a Comment

Pinning Elements to your pages with CSS I found this great example of how to pin elements of a page so they stay fixed at a certain location in a browser window. The bad part? It doesn't work in IE 5.5/6.0 on Windows. Since this is the most popular browser, it kinda makes me lose hope. The reason I'm intrigued by this CSS is because I have a requirement right now that I need to keep the footer of my page "pinned" to the bottom of the browser window. I suppose I could use frames, but I'd rather not. A workaround for IE might be to use a floating layer, but all the scripts I found seemed to fail when I added an XHTML DOCTYPE. That is why I curse IE today.

Update: I recieved a solution for my Experts-Exchange posting on this topic. It looks like I'll be able to use CSS expressions in IE to make this happen. Sweet! My latest code works in IE 6, Mozilla and Opera 7 - I hope it works in IE 5.5 and Opera 6. Posted in The Web at Apr 07 2003, 03:39:19 PM MDT Add a Comment

Blogging motivated by Broadband? It is my personal little theory that most bloggers have high-bandwidth internet connections. I am seriously de-motivated from surfing and blogging on a dial-up connection. Even worse, our dial-up connection has been on the fritz, and with no connection - I don't even try. I don't even care to read anyone's blogs and I'm starting to wonder if blogging is all that it's cracked up to be. java.blogs is not even interesting to me anymore. I've got to get my internet connection fixed! I'm talking like a crazy man! ;-)

The good news is our ISP called Julie this morning and we're scheduled for an upgrade on the 14th. They also (finally) admitted that there have been sporadic internet connection issues in our area. They've been so damn arrogant this whole time that it "wasn't their problem" - it's nice to see them admit fault. My mom is in town all week at a conference and my dad is flying in on Wednesday, so I'd expect a pretty light week of blogging until next Monday (the 14th). Posted in Roller at Apr 07 2003, 11:25:33 AM MDT 1 Comment