Raible Designs

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.

What to do with my Chapters?

Julie suggested I just post them on this site. Then I got to thinking - what if all the authors made a PDF version of the book, and it was downloadable as the whole thing or as selected chapters. Let's say $5/chapter and you can pick and choose whichever ones you want. Sounds like a good idea, but the problem would be protecting the PDFs from being shipped around between friends. Or we could just give them away, in hopes that our knowledge would inspire others to hire us (as in a new job or a new book).

I don't know what to do, but I'd like to get my chapters out somehow. I'm afraid that if I just sit and wait, they'll never get out, and the technology will be old news shortly. The stuff I wrote about has staying power, but only until the next version of XDoclet and Struts.

I guess the good news is that I'll keep struts-resume up to date with the latest version, but the writing will be out of date by the end of the year.

The Debate is flawed: Struts vs. WebWork

Personally, I think the debate between Struts and WebWork is irrelevant. This is because I don't think that the Web Application frameworks are the problem. I spend most of my days getting persistence to work. Granted it's gotten a whole lot easier with Hibernate, but I've spent a lot of time tackling that learning curve in the last couple of months. Thanks to Dave Johnson and Gavin King for guiding me up the curve. I spend about 30 minutes each day writing Struts-related code, if that. More time is spent writing tests, CSS, JavaScript (the most time) and DAO's/Managers.

So the problem is my brain. If I could just get the damn thing to work right - it wouldn't matter which framework I chose, because I'd just know it. No learning curve == awesome productivity.

The WebWork guys claim to have this. Therefore, I'm interested. However, who's hiring WebWork gurus? Heh - I know - what I really need to do is learn WebWork and then I can offer an unbiased opinion. Right now, no one is offering an unbiased opinion. Patrick is heavily invested in Struts, as am I. Heck, I've written a chapter about it and I've used it on many project. Jason is invested in WebWork as he's a committer.

Baaah, I'm just gonna learn .NET - that's where the Florida Jobs are. Struts .NET and WebWork .NET - maybe I should work on getting those started. ;-) The post is meant to be read with a smile on your face - I don't want to start yet another flame war.

My Web Standards Compaign. Target 1 = Jakarta

I'm thinking of starting a campaign to motivate Jakarta's project sites to be standards-compliant. By this, I mean get rid of the font tags and other color/size/positioning elements in the HTML. Use CSS and XHTML. Think it's worth pursuing. In reality, it doesn't really buy much except the prestige of being standards-compliant. Of course, I might be the only one who sees this as important. Wouldn't it be interesting if Java compilers were like browsers. You could do some things in one, and it wouldn't work in another compiler. That's the way the web is - let's fix it.

Netscape's DevEdge Reborn and cool style switcher

Zeldman reports that Netscape's DevEdge has been reborn. I really dig the style switcher via the customize button at the top right - as well as the font + - R buttons.

Netscape's DevEdge has been reborn as a standards showcase: “Now DevEdge is not only a great source of tools and information for developers, it demonstrates extensive use of web standards for accessibility, maintainability, and user interaction.” Features include tableless, CSS layout; switchable styles, one of which includes a header graphic that hearkens back to the original DevEdge of the mid-1990s; cross-browser dropdown menus (these don’t work in IE5/Mac, but IE5/Mac users have been provided for); and link URLs that print out for your convenience. Eric Meyer contributed to the redesign and more information is available on his site.

RE: Where's the $$ in Java

Danno Ferrin asks "Where's the $$ at in Java?" I don't think I have the answer to this, but I can say that the money has certainly declined in the last year. I wanted to comment on this post, because I think I've found myself an interesting niche. There seem to be few Java Developers that know UI Development stuff like CSS, HTML and JavaScript. When I say know, I mean really know it in the sense that they could construct a good looking web page from scratch. On most of the projects I've been on, sure there have been UI Developers, but that's all they knew was CSS, HTML and JavaScript - they didn't know much Java (if any at all). I'm not saying it's impossible for developers to know both Java and UI Technologies, just that it's rare. So if you want to create a niche for yourself as a Java Developer - learn the UI stuff. If you're a UI Developer, learn the Java stuff. It can't hurt can it?

www.struts.ru

Cool - there's a new site for all the Struts documentation in Russian. I actually got a degree in Russian, and I dig Struts, so of course - this interests me. Beautiful country, awesome culture and a very rich history. Too bad I gave up Russian after graduating to learn all this computer stuff instead. Now I can barely understand a full sentence - and I was pretty close to fluent my senior year. One question I have for non-English programmers - do you write Java/JavaScript/CSS/HTML in your native language or in English? I've always wondered...

Great Weekend and the DOM

Boy, what a great weekend I had. Three of my best friends and I drove to Steamboat on Friday night and met up with some other very good friends. There were about 20 of us total that rented a house and had a great time. It was -21 (F) when we drove up, and about -10 when we went skiing on Saturday. The fun we had made up for the cold, and we actually ran into another friend that we hadn't seen in 5 years! Good times were had by all.

Today, back at the grindstone, I got to start working on a UI prototype. I did a lot of stuff with the DOM in JavaScript and CSS. Man that stuff rocks and makes it so easy to create a truly user-friendly webapp. I was doing pretty simple stuff like changing table row background colors, adding/deleting rows in a table and duplicating rows. Tomorrow, I'll be implementing a client-side sorting script on a table. I'm lucky on this project in that I only need to support IE 5.5+ - which has pretty good DOM support. I developed all day long on IE 6.0 and was amazed when I tested it (at the end of the day) and it actually worked on IE 5.5. Made me smile from ear-to-ear. I checked it in and left before I broke anything.

Cool CSS Design

I do like Russ's new design, and I'm almost inspired to redesign myself. Naaahhh, I think I'll save that for a when I'm really bored, or maybe when Julie's in Florida for a week in March. The reason I'm writing this post is to point out the sweet DHTML over at the International Herald Tribune that Russ mentions. In the bottom right corner of the page, you can adjust the font-size and number of columns. Very cool - and the top menu floats while you scroll. All cool stuff and nicely done.

[HTML] Fieldset and Legend

I was reminded today of the <fieldset> and <legend> tags in HTML (BTW, they also work in XHTML). Basically, they are used to draw and label a box around input elements. Here's an example:

<form action="">
<div>
    <fieldset>
        <legend>Name Information</legend>
        <label for="firstName">First Name:</label>
        <input type="text" name="firstName" id="firstName" value="" /><br />
        <label for="lastName">Last Name:</label>
        <input type="text" name="lastName" id="lastName" value="" /><br />
    </fieldset>
    
    <fieldset>
        <legend>Address Information</legend>
        <label for="address">Address:</label>
        <input type="text" name="address" id="address" value="" /><br />
        <label for="city">City:</label>
        <input type="text" name="city" id="city" value="" /><br />
    </fieldset>
</div>
</form>

I added a little CSS for the fieldset and legend tags, and you end up with this:

Pretty cool eh? The labels end up in the text boxes (on some browsers) courtesy of the the label.js script.