Raible Designs

Good Story

Read this - sounds cool! If only it where true, that would rock. However, it's a featured story from Weekly World News, which we all know is a bunhc of horse pucky.

NEW YORK -- Federal investigators have arrested an enigmatic Wall Street wiz on insider-trading charges -- and incredibly, he claims to be a time-traveler from the year 2256! [more...]

Frames and XHTML

I'm in the midst of a small redesign of an application's UI for a client. The previous (and current) design uses an <iframe> to display most of the content in the app (it's an e-learning app). The driving forces behind the re-design are to 1) make the UI fluid rather than fixed height/width, and 2) make the application work on Opera 6 on Linux.

The re-design began with them sending me some screenshots of proposed layouts, and I used that to formulate what you see today. Basically, what they (and I) was hoping to accomplish was a fixed header/footer height and a fluid center. I tried doing this with an iframe, but had inconsistence results. So I tried consulting the experts. No one seemed to have a solution - and it seems that a fixed header/footer, fluid center is not possible with XHTML. So I resorted to using frames, which is what you see now. The reason I'm writing this post is to express my frustration with frames and the current XHTML Standards. You basically start a framed page with a <frameset> right? Any of you that have worked with frames know that it's a headache to get framespacing correct between all the browsers you need to support. Throw Netscape 4 into the mix, and consistency is virtually impossible. The problem with a frameset in XHMTL is that there are no supporting attributes for eliminating a frameset's spacing or border. From looking at the XHTML DTD, you can see that our old friends frameborder (="0" needed for Mozilla) and border (="0" needed for Opera) are missing:

<!ATTLIST frameset
    %coreattrs; 
    rows %MultiLengths; #IMPLIED
    cols %MultiLengths; #IMPLIED
    onload %Script; #IMPLIED
    onunload %Script; #IMPLIED
>

So I ended up following Zeldman's advice and K10K's examples and adding these attributes in. Why? Because they work to achieve the results I want. It doesn't validate, but it does work, so I'm going with it. If anyone has any alternatives to achieve borderless frames with CSS, please let me know.

The cool part about this post is that I get to tell you that the device we're targeting with Opera 6/Linux is the FreePad - a type of Tablet PC, but more like a wireless browser. Looks cool, that's for sure - and it's possible I'll even get a demo machine to test the new layout on.

FreeRoller gets a new home

FreeRoller is going to have a new home. The JavaLobby has offered to host FreeRoller on one of there servers which is significantly more powerful than "el crappo", the dinky box which currently hosts FreeRoller. In order to support the move FreeRoller will be going down for a little bit of time in the near future (probably today). Once FreeRoller is back up we will still be using "el crappo" until the DNS migration is complete, which will take a day or two. The DNS migration should be transparent though so the only outage will occur when we switch databases. [All Things Java]

Anyone with University of Miami connections?

I found this sweet job this morning. I submitted my resume, but, as most of you know, the hiring manager has probably received 1000+ resumes in his/her inbox today. So my question is - do any of you know any University of Miami folks that could get me an "inside track." Any help is appreciated.

OSCache doesn't play nicely with Tiles

I was hoping to use OSCache to cache my JSP pages to overcome my 15-seconds-to-load performance issue. I was hoping to simply place <cache:cache> tags around my entire Tile's baseLayout.jsp. However, I was disappointed to find that this did not work. I get this nice error message:

Can't insert page '/common/header.jsp' : Illegal to flush within a custom tag 

I even tried it just surrounding my 200+ row table of indexed properties, but no dice, same error. Oh well, onto caching with Hibernate's JCS support.

Are you a contractor wondering what you should charge?

I'm sure all of you have wondered what you should be getting paid for your services. Especially if you're a contractor. It sucks that you never know if someone is making more than you. In our society, it's sometimes taboo to discuss how much you make. That's why I like the Government Jobs - sure they pay less, but you know exactly how much everyone makes. Anyway, the purpose of this post is to point you to RealRates.com where you can see what other folks are getting paid. I encourage you all to add your rates. Moving to Florida doesn't look so bad when you search on Java and Florida.

Which caching framework to use?

I discovered this afternoon (after I got everything working - thanks to Jason's comment) that the main process in the webapp I'm building (day job) takes 15 seconds to process. It could be have something to do with the fact that the HTML page itself is 1.5MB of data (view-source, save as). And it's a very lightweight page as we're using strict XHTML and mucho CSS. So now it's time to start looking into caching frameworks. For the web/JSP side, I'll probably use OSCache. It's seems to be more tried and true, and commons-cache is still in the sandbox. If any of your have experience, chime in so I don't pick the wrong one! Another method I'm going to try is using JCS with Hibernate. Since I'm using XDoclet already, all I have to do is add the following to the top of my persistable objects.

@hibernate.jcs-cache usage="read-write"

Struts Upgrade: 1.1 RC1 to Nightly Build (20030326)

I decided to upgrade from Struts 1.1 RC1 to a nightly build this morning, hoping to get the fix for the Validator bug that requires an Internet connection. I was also hoping to solve an issue I have where Eclipse thinks that ListUtils.sum(list1, list2) is deprecated (not so according to it's JavaDocs - Ant doesn't seem to think it's deprecated either... wierd). However, instead I was greeted with a couple of new deprecation errors that you might want to know about.

• ConvertUtils.setDefaultLong(long) has been deprecated. Again, not according to its javadocs.
• Action.MESSAGES_KEY deprecated in favor of Globals.MESSAGES_KEY

The good news is that the Validator bug is indeed fixed and I don't have to set my proxy host/port variables for Tomcat anymore.

Tomcat 4.1.24: No More OutOfMemory Errors

I know I'm probably jinxing myself, but I'm going to say it anyway. I just checked my catalina.out file (a.k.a. Tomcat's log file) and I haven't had an OutOfMemory error since I upgraded to Tomcat 4.1.24. I was getting them all the time with Tomcat 4.1.18. Hopefully you've seen the same stability increase. I'm sure this site will crash with an OutOfMemory error as soon as I finish this post! ;0)

Update: I send a message to Keith to verify that Tomcat hasn't crashed since Saturday night. Here is his response.

The cron job hasn't had to restart it, and there are no out 
of memory errors in the log.  I can't find any sign that it
failed since then.

Keith

Sweeeeeettt!!

Speed up your site

Zeldman hooks us up with another cool web tool, WebSiteOptimization.com.

Andrew B. King, author of Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization (New Riders: 2003) and founder of Webreference.com, announces a free new service for web designers. Submit your URL to the Web Page Analyzer and it will tally the weight of your markup, images, CSS and JavaScript, then offer advice on how to improve your download and display time.

Here are my results - looks like I have too much HTML. I think I'll cut my displayed number of posts from 20 to 10.