Sometime ago I read an article about this idea of showing labels behind fields rather than next to them and fade them out as soon as the user types in some text and I liked it. The login form that I have designed is based on the same idea but it’s even more gorgeous!

They say a demo is worth a thousand words so without further ado here’s the demo page. Go ahead and type in some text in the fields to see the effect.

As you can see rather than fading out the label, we move it to sit on top of the field. But the devil is in the details. In other words, the login form renders well even under the following conditions:

• In browsers that do not support stylesheets (e.g. in Lynx)
• With JavaScript disabled
• In IE 6 (IE 6 is still sooo popular in archaic environments). Well, no, just kidding. I don’t care about that creepy wombat anymore.

HTML Page

CSS

JavaScript

Update 1 – 3 July 2011:

I found a bug in the initial implementation given above a couple of days ago. Suppose that the login field contains one character and then the user quickly presses backspace and writes another character. This leads to the label staying behind the field while it’s not empty. Changing installAnimation like below fixes this bug:

Fixed installAnimation

This alternative implementation stops all the currently queued animations for the label element before starting a new animation.

So, if you are a PHP guru, like this theme, and want to make it even better, you are more than welcome to contribute to the project by forking it and submitting your patches.

One thing that surprised me quite a bit was how easy PHP is to read and how quickly you can become productive writing PHP code. The learning curve is so gentle that you can hardly notice it. Another surprising thing I found in WP’s codebase is that rather than passing multiple parameters to a given method, they encode all the parameters for that method in a string and then pass that in. Weird.

For example, let’s pretend that we have a Post model that has a title and a body. In order to trim content of title and body before validation, all we have to do is:

By default, trimify converts blank strings to nil. This can be overridden by setting the :nilify option to false:

The current version of Trimify is only compatible with Rails 2.3 but I am planning to release a Rails 3 compatible version soon. To use Trimify simply install it by running gem install trimify. The project is hosted at Github.

Acknowledgments

Trimify is inspired by the nilify plugin written by Tobias Schmidt.

Fast forward to 2010 (almost 2011). Now check this:

(Source: Zen and the Art of Programming)

Muhahaha!

While SL4J’s use of vararg parameters eliminates a huge chunk of these conditional blocks, there still are (possibly rare) cases that creating a log message involves more than just string concatenations and as such it is still necessary to guard the block of logging logic inside a conditional block.

Thanks to Java closures this is not true anymore. In what follows I present a basic implementation of a prototype proof-of-concept logger called Logosure that relies on BGGA closures and skips execution of chunks of logging logic when their corresponding levels are turned off.

The Logger

Our logger is very simple. It only contains two different logging levels: INFO and WARNING. For the sake of simplicity, the levels do not have parent-child relationship. In other words, if the logger’s level is set to INFO, it only emits INFO level logging messages and when it’s set to WARNING it only emits WARNING level log messages.

Again, for the sake of simplicity, our logger only prints to the standard output.

And Level is an enum:

The only interesting part of this logger class is the first log method: it receives a function type as its second parameter that returns a String object. It invokes the logging block passed to it only if the current logging level is equal to the level passed in as the argument. Using this Logger is very simple:

In the example above the code inside the third logging block won’t be executed at all. This happens all without littering our source code with conditional blocks.

As Java closures are still work in progress and the syntax is still a matter of debate it is too soon to implement a full-fledged closure based logger, but I believe that once Java closures become finalized we will see logging frameworks adopt closures in similar ways.

You can fork the current version of Logosure from Github.

Now someone should “dash-separatize” all my compound keywords! Duh!

After some investigation it turned out that some calls to Java code from the XSLT files are being ignored by the transformer. Debugging the code and stepping through all the method calls down to XSLTC and other internal classes did not uncover the reason for the mysterious skipping of these Java calls.

Suddenly something came to my attention: in some of the XSLT files, we are not interested in the value returned by the Java call; we only call a method to modify the state of the Java class. To do so, we declare a variable in the form of:

To call [cci lang="java"]aUtilityMethod()[/cci] and then never use [cci lang="XML"]$ununsedVariable[/cci] anywhere in the XSLT file again. I decided to use one of these variables in the XSLT file to see if that forces the XSL transformer to call the method, so I added a harmless comment right after the variable declaration in the form of:

Voila! Now the transformer is calling [cci lang="java"]aUtilityMethod()[/cci]. It turned out that Java’s default built-in version of [cci lang="Java"]TransformerFactory[/cci] is either skipping running the select expression for unused variables or is doing it lazily. Considering that XPath expressions are side-effect free and that they only return a set of nodes, it makes sense to implement suchlike optimizations, but the optimizer should check the select expression and omit the optimization if it is a Java call.

But is it a bug? Well, yes and no. The truth is that it’s not working correctly. But on the other hand, as this feature is an undocumented and internal feature of the default XSLT implementation of the JDK, it is an unsupported feature and it is better to avoid its use.

Then they define a layer as a piece of the hardware and software stack that hoses services within a given tier. This definition of layer is different to other definitions I’ve seen so far. They list virtual platform, application, infrastructure, enterprise services, compute and storage, and networking structure as typical layers of an architecture.

While this definition is somehow different, it makes total sense to consider all these aspects when designing an architecture: Are we going to deploy to Weblogic or JBoss? Are we deploying to Windows or Linux? Will we deploy the application on one or more many-core servers or cheaper multi-core systems? Will we use a high performance PCI-e based solid state storage as our storage system or are we going to use traditional rack-based NAS storages? What DBMS are we going to choose and why?

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling — the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. — Nikolaus Wirth

Defining Libraries as Maven Coordinates

This enables developers to quickly define libraries as Maven coordinates even in projects that do not use Maven and then IDEA can download the appropriate JAR files for the project from Maven repos.

This can be done either by asking the developer to enter the dependencies in a text field like:

And also by providing a text field for entering additional repositories:

[or] Alternatively, a short form syntax might be used for declaring the coordinates:

Also there should be selectable options for downloading source and JavaDocs for the libraries from Maven as well.

And yes my friends! IDEA gurus do pay attention to their users’ requests. This feature has now been added to IntelliJ IDEA X, the next version of the IDE:

Getting External Libraries Easily

JARs of many frameworks and their dependencies get updated too often now. But you do not want to turn your project into a Maven project just because of this? Then this feature is just for you.

In IntelliJ IDEA 10 you can search for & download libraries with dependencies for any framework published on some public maven repository. Minimum Maven experience is required. Just click ‘Attach Classes from Repository…‘

Now let’s see when they will add my other feature request to IDEA: @SuppressWarnings like feature for HTML elements.

To be fair, the NetBeans team has also fixed all the bugs that I’ve reported to them very quickly. But, Eclipse… no matter how great you are and how great your architecture is, your WTP is sooo buggy and years after Maven’s debut, you still don’t have a rock solid Maven plugin. Shame on you mate!

Bug 41431
Bug 153692

Being abstract is something profoundly different from being vague… The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise. — Edsger Dijkstra

Source: Best Programming Quotes

2: MockSMTP.app: MockSMTP is a native Mac application that embeds its own SMTP server. It also features an e-mail client browser, enabling instant viewing of both raw content and HTML rendering, so you can see how your mail looks when delivered. A nice product overall but is buggy.

3: Dumbster: The Dumbster is a very simple fake SMTP server designed for unit and system testing applications that send email messages. It responds to all standard SMTP commands but does not deliver messages to the user. The messages are stored within the Dumbster for later extraction and verification. The best option among the three for unit testing Java applications.

The solution was quite easy: explicitly setting the charset to latin1 in create table statements (or alternatively changing the default charset of the database to latin1).

^*Use of VARCHARS should be avoided in primary key columns.

Programmer’s Drinking Song (sung to the tune of “100 Bottles of Beer”)
99 little bugs in the code,
99 bugs in the code,
fix one bug, compile it again
101 little bugs in the code.
101 little bugs in the code…
(Repeat until BUGS = 0)

Well, this one was quite funny. Probably one more reason to write tests? Also, in Java and a number of other languages, Repeat until BUGS = 0 is just one little bug in the code .

Writing software that fully meets its specifications is like walking on water. For each, the former is easy if the later is frozen and near impossible if fluid.

Source: Quotes on Requirements and Users

In the near future ePub will be at least as important as PDF when it comes to electronic documents and books.

Simply send an email to the JCP PMO and let them know that you’d like the JCP specs to be published as ePub documents too.

According to Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with tiny Global Equities Research, 7 minutes of Steve Jobs’ keynote is allotted for Microsoft. Microsoft will reportedly be talking about their development tool Visual Studio 2010. The new version of Visual Studio will reportedly allow developers to write native applications for the iPhone, iPad and Mac OS.

But could it be more than that? What if Microsoft announce that they are bringing .NET to OS X as well?

• annotations-api.jar
• el-api.jar
• jasper-el.jar
• jsp-api.jar
• servlet-api.jar

And then add this User Library to your project. Now Content Assist should work for implicit objects as well. Alternatively, if your target application server is JBoss and you have JBoss Tools installed, you can select the J2EE 5.0 libraries from the Add Library… window to enable content assist for your Web app.