Raible Designs

Friday June 20, 2003

.NET's built-in tools and controls generate invalid XHTML and CSS

Mails we've received, forum discussions, and recent Splorp posts all complain that .NET's built-in tools and controls generate invalid XHTML and CSS. The workaround? Don't use the built-in tools and controls. The value of .NET without those built-in tools and controls? Not much.

.NET is Microsoft's platform for web services. It derives it power from XML, a web standard. A product based on one open standard should support others, not break them.

When Microsoft does the wrong thing, developers feel helpless. You are not helpless. You have a choice of development platforms. [Zeldman]

(emphasis mine) The choice is simple, use J2EE ~ where the flexibility is free! Posted in Java at Jun 20 2003, 01:14:42 PM MDT 3 Comments

Professional JSP 2.0 Update Just in case anyone is interested, I thought I'd report on how Professional JSP 2.0 (now being published by Apress) is progressing. I received some initial feedback that my Struts/XDoclet chapter would not be included in the book, but would be a separate download (I'd still get paid for it though). Most of the reasons seemed to be indicating that the chapter was too advanced - newbies wouldn't get it. Personally, I hate reading newbie books, so why would I write a newbie chapter? I also hate simple sample apps, that's why I wrote a fully functional one. Anyway, I convinced them that this chapter did have value and now they are going to include it in the book, but as a case study rather than a regular chapter.

As for the security chapter, they said they really liked the content, but (again) the example was too advanced. I have been asked to remove XDoclet as a dependency since I don't explain it until the Struts chapter. This turned out to be a lot easier than I thought it'd be - only took me about an hour last night. I simply built the project with XDoclet, and then copied the artifacts (web.xml, generated ValidatorForms, struts-config.xml, validation.xml, *.hbm.xml, etc.) back into the source tree. I then tweaked the build.xml file to pick up the artifacts, ran "test-all" and voila - it worked?!

The lesson I learned from all this is that XDoclet is great for rapid development - but possibly only while you you are developing new features. Once an application stabilizes or development is discontinued (I don't plan on further developing security-example), it's pretty easy to strip out the XDoclet dependency and (probably) make it easier for users to understand. Posted in Java at Jun 20 2003, 10:40:55 AM MDT 11 Comments

Quit Reading Me! Just kidding. It's just that the ol' bandwidth issue has reared its ugly head again. I sent the following message to Keith last night:

Am I reading this stats page correctly?

Am I already over my KB limit for the month?

His response:

Wow, you've almost 3/4 million hits already this month....

It looks like it averages about 7.7K per hit, so yep, you appear to be over 5 
GB already this month.

I only have a 5 GB plan, so I asked him how much it would be to move to a 10 GB plan (no response yet). Why don't I just move? Because I like Keith, and ever since I moved to the new server, stability has been awesome. I pay $30/month for the 5 giger, so hopefully I can get the 10 GB for an extra $10/month. Then again, according to this page, 8 GB is $80/month. Maybe I will be moving... Posted in Java at Jun 20 2003, 06:23:31 AM MDT 11 Comments