Raible Designs

Tabbed Forms - Making the web look like Excel

One of the things I'm working on for my day job right now is the ability to display an Excel-like UI for editing a form. So I did a search on Google tonight and found DHTML Kitchen. On this site, they had exactly what I was looking for - a howto for creating a tabbed panel system. So I've used this example to create a prototype of what I can do. This is pretty slick b/c now I can give the users a UI that looks like the Excel they're used to, and I can use the same ValidatorForm for the entire page. It even supports remembering which tab you last selected, and also allows navigation to a tab. The DHTML Kitchen also appears to have all kinds of other goodies to checkout. I'll definitely be adding it to my list of cool bookmarks.

If someone could verify that this prototype works in IE 5.5 - that'd be awesome! This is the browser we have to support at work and all my browsers are 6.0+. In return, I offer you the source in a single zip file :-) After playing with this a bit after posting - it seems like it's got a couple of issues in IE 6. The first is that a double line shows up at the bottom of the top tabs after refreshing. Clicking on any tab at the top snaps the tab bar back into place. The second is performance - it's taking 3-8 seconds to load the page - yikes! I'm still going to use it though, and hopefully optimize and fix these issues later.

VNC on OSX

I was fortunate enough to be subscribed to Forwarding Address: OS X in NetNewsWire and stumbled upon this easier-than-all-get-out HowTo about setting up VNC on OS X. In my environment, it only tool one step:

• Install this on the Mac you want to control: Share My Desktop

I tried to install a VNC Server on OS X a while back and never had any success. Share My Desktop made it real easy. Now if I could only find a similar HowTo for setting up VNC to "share my desktop" on Red Hat 8. I've had a similar "I can't get it to work" experience on that platform.

Tomcat and Apache References

This site seems to get a lot of hits for the Apache 2 + Tomcat 4 HowTo I updated. Therefore, you might want to check out Bruno Vernay's list of resources on this topic.

Updated Tomcat+Apache and Apache+SSL HOWTO

I spent the last couple of days struggling with setting up Apache 2.0.42 and Tomcat 4.0.5 on both Windows and Linux. I've updated an article I found on this matter and published it (with permission from the original author) at:

http://www.raibledesigns.com/tomcat/index.html

I also setup SSL on Apache with the above configuration and learned a lot in that process too. Once again, I found an article, updated it and have published it (with permission from the original author) at:

http://www.raibledesigns.com/tomcat/ssl-howto.html

I hope by updating these articles I've made it easier for anyone else to do the same. My Configuration? Windows XP (SP1) / Red Hat Linux 7.3 with J2SE 1.4.1, Apache 2.0.42 and Tomcat 4.0.5.

I attempted to set these up on Mac OS X, but found no binary version of mod_jk.so on Jakarta's site. I also tried to build it from source, but no dice there either. Enjoy!