Raible Designs

Handling Time Consuming Requests

Domininic says, "I am try to find a good way to have an intermediate page load up while my Struts Action performs a large database query and then XSLT transformation." Ask and ye shall receive. I received the following e-mail from Alec Missine a while back. The attachment has a method of implementing a TCR. Let me know how it works as I haven't tried it myself.

----- Original Message -----
From: Alec Missine
To: [email protected]
Sent: Monday, January 07, 2002 3:59 PM
Subject: processing time consuming requests (was: wait page primer)


There's been some interest to the message I posted last month on the subject. The war file was too big though, so I compressed the stuff as much as I could. I also added some javadoc and UML diagrams.

The attached Struts-based application prototypes the wait page support for a time-consuming request (TCR). When a TCR (e.g., a database search) starts, the appropriate wait page is being sent to the browser after the request's ETC (Estimated Time to Complete) expires.

In the meantime, the corresponding action (the database search) is being started in the background thread on the server. If the default ETC is used (ad infinitum) or the action completes before the request's ETC expires, there is no wait page at all - the browser gets the result page right away, while the background thread is still busy closing the resources.

The wait page has javascript that polls the server to update the wait page with the TCR's progress. When the TCR completes, the wait page is being replaced with the appropriate result page.

This implementation has been tested on Apache Tomcat 4.0 with an Oracle 8.1.6 database as a data source. Presently, the application provides read-only access to all database tables for all database schemas through extensive use of the java.sql.DatabaseMetaData object. The next release will support insert/update/delete functionality.

Alec

Attachments: tcr.zip (114 KB)

Hope this helps!

Opera 7 Beta Available

Finally, it's here, revamped from the rendering engine and up. Opera 7 Beta is smaller and faster than before, offering you a whole range of new features to make you more productive on the Web. [ Read More | Screenshot ]

Installing now...

Installing/Configuring Apache and Tomcat

I found Galatea Flashguides at this early morning hour (2:30 a.m.) while watching Abbie and trying to keep her entertained so Julie can get some sleep. Looks like a great site for how to's for installing Apache, Tomcat, JOnAS, and Cocoon.

Struts Kick Start

Kevin Bedell and James Turner have setup Struts Kick Start; A site devoted to discussion and support of the Struts web application platform, centered around the SAMS book.

Tomorrow night at the Denver Java User Group, Sue Spielman explains how to use Struts to build Enterprise Applications. I think I know most of what will be presented, but it never hurts to attend a Java User Group meeting. We'll have to see how Abbie and Mom feels about Daddy taking off for a few hours (Julie has the flu, so I doubt I'll make it). I actually contacted Sue a few weeks back about contracting prospects. She responded quickly and opportunities seemed promising after exchanging a couple of e-mails. But alas, I haven't heard from her since.

What's your site's content size?

This site is 29.18% text context. Apparently, the rest is markup. Found via web-graphics.com.

The tool (wittingly called getContentSize) apparently does not include images or attached CSS, or javascript in it's analysis. I believe that considering it measures my total page size as 51131 bytes, where Phoenix tells me it's 55270 bytes. What it doesn't tell you is that I have around 250 (yes 250!) links on this site, and since it doesn't count those as text (<a href> is markup), I think I've done pretty well. Here are some interesting statistics for other sites (and lots of markup with little text):

Mini-Me is Hosed

I tried Kurt's suggestion (booting into OS 9) to get rid of the phantom file in my Trash. I couldn't see a Trash (.Trash) folder in /Users/matt, so I tried clicking on and using the iClean app that was sitting on my desktop. I guess I installed it at some point. Anyway, it fixed a bunch of my aliases, cleaned up my internet cache and such. When I rebooted into OS X, I get the Mac equivalent of the BSOD. It says You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button. I tried using the Disk Utility on Jaguar Disc 1 with no luck (errors abound when trying to repair the disk), and I am unable to re-install OS X because there is no destination drive to install to. So in other words, I've completely f****ed up my Mac again - with little hope for fixing it. I thought this was supposed to be the "friendly OS?"

This is what usually happens when I spend all day on the computer goofing off - I shoulda done some actual work.

Update: I found the problem is a good ol' Kernel Panic. I'll be testing out Apple's tech support folks tomorrow.

Remote Scripting Weblog

Brent Ashley now has a blog. I came to know Brent via his Remote Scripting libraries - particularly the Javascript (JSRS) version. At the time (about 6 months ago), I was trying to write a SCORM implementation using Javascript and Struts. I got it working, but then realized that I needed synchronous communication. Hmmm, in looking at this forum post it appears that Peppoz has implemented SCORM using this same architecture! Cool - sometimes reminiscing does add value.

Eclipse Plugins - Updates

I found these gems on the eclipse.tools newsgroup.

• A new version of the Jalopy Java Source Code Formatter has been released. Visit the Jalopy home page for more information about this software.
• Easy Struts 0.6.1 was just released, all the wizards were refactored, a Struts view was added and Struts 1.1 modules are supported. Install it from Update Manager or download it.

Acrobat Reader 5.1

Download Acrobat Reader 5.1. New version includes support for Palm OS and Pocket PC, digital signatures, file attachments, e-mail options, and more.

And then he added search highlighting

I've added a pretty cool javascript library called searchhi to this site.

The searchhi JavaScript library is a way of automatically highlighting words on a page when that page was reached by a search engine. In essence, if you search, for example, Google for some words, and then follow a link from the search results to a searchhi enabled page, the words you searched for will be highlighted on that page. Pretty neat, huh?

To add it to your site, simply copy the searchhi library to somewhere on your web server, and then include it in every page you want this to work on by adding the following line somewhere in the header: <script src="searchhi.js" type="text/javascript"><script> Then add, somewhere in your stylesheet, something like span.searchword {background-color: yellow; color: inherit}. I chose color: black since some colors in my menu are white, and white on yellow doesn't look so good.