Raible Designs

New Powerbooks ~ I agree with James

I agree with James about the new PowerBooks. My 17" simply rocks. I do have to disagree on one point though - it's actually not that hot. It seems to run much cooler than my 15" 667MHz.

Know of any good Calendar Tag Libraries?

Anyone know of a good Calendar Tag Library - that renders calendars like the ones you see on blogs? I found this one from Coldbeans, but it's $50 - whereas free is always better. We just need it to render a calendar on a page and gray out certain days (with CSS) to say that day is not available.

Tiles Tips o' the Day

Here's a couple of things I learned today that might be useful to you Struts developers out there. When using Tiles, you'll normally import all the attributes into your baseLayout.jsp, and then your attributes are exposes as beans/scripting variables (you can actually grab them with JSTL tags). Rather than using:

<tiles:importAttribute/>

Use:

<tiles:importAttribute scope="request"/>

And then all your inserted pages can access these attributes. Pretty slick when you got a little JSTL love in the mix. The second tip is how to implement definition path switching. Let's look at the following baseLayout definition as an example:

  <definition name=".baseLayout" path="/layouts/baseLayout.jsp">
    <put name="titleKey"/>
    <put name="header" value="/common/header.jsp"/>
    <put name="sidebar" value=".sidebar"/>
    <put name="footer" value="/common/footer.jsp"/>
  </definition>

You currently cannot change the "path" attribute with a Controller, so you have to do it as the Tiles author recommends - by changing your path to refer to an action. So I changed the path on this particular definition to be:

<definition name=".baseLayout" path="/do/switchLayout">

Where my action-mapping is defined as follows:

 <action path="/switchLayout" 
   type="org.appfuse.webapp.action.SwitchLayoutAction">
   <forward name="printLayout" path="/layouts/printLayout.jsp" />
   <forward name="baseLayout" path="/layouts/baseLayout.jsp" />
 </action>

Then in SwitchLayoutAction.java, I have the following code:

boolean print =
    Boolean.valueOf(request.getParameter("print")).booleanValue();

// see if a print parameter is passed in the request
if (print) {
    log.debug("switching base layout to printing...");

    return mapping.findForward("printLayout");
} else {
    return mapping.findForward("baseLayout");
}

Pretty slick IMO! It's easy to make the printLayout.jsp only contain some simple wrapper stuff and only do <tile:insert attribute="content"/>. Of course, in this particular example, you could just use a print stylesheet (media="print"), but that doesn't work so well on 4.x browsers (man I hate those beotches).

Refactoring Struts Menu

I made a bunch of changes to Struts Menu (a.k.a. Navigator) for use in my current project. Highlights include dynamic parameters (configured in menu-config.xml) and the ability to create menu templates using Velocity. The full story can be see on my wiki.

And yes, I did really post this at 2:30 in the morning - ugh, I'm off to bed!