• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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Struts has support for indexed properties in its form beans. In fact, it has support for both simple and complex indexed properties. Ironically I have been able to find lots of documentation online to explain the more complex situation but none for the simpler one. I have been able to find documentation on using arrays of beans is form beans but not of arrays of simple literals like strings and integers. And I’ve done a lot of googling on the matter. Having the ability to have an array of strings in your form bean is a very handy feature. This is a very handy thing to be able to do and you’d be right to assume that it should be simple, and it is simple, it’s just not documented anywhere I could find (and I spend a lot of time looking). So, to help others who might be stuck with the same problem here is a worked example that should make it all clear.

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Something that has annoyed me for a long time is that JavaScript is looked on by many people as just being a stripped down version of Java. You take Java, you take out most of the features and you get JS. This is completely wrong. The two are two completely different languages which follow different paradigms. One is Hard Typed and Object Oriented, the Other is Loosely Typed and Object Based. To give you an idea of just how different the languages are I would say that Java is to JavaScript like C/C++ is to Perl. I.e. they are completely different languages in just about every respect but their syntax is superficially similar.

Far from being a stripped down version of Java, JS is in many ways a more powerful language and is certainly more feature-rich. And I’m not talking about little conveniences that make programming a little easier but major features that make some things all but impossible to do with Java but which JS does simply and naturally. In this article I’m going to look at some of these features. While I was writing this article, I came up with many less dramatic advantages which JS has over Java, which just make things easier with JS. Initially I had also included those in this article but they made it too long for the modern attention span. Instead, I’m compiling them into a separate article with the working title Hidden JS which I hope to publish within the next week or so. The inspiration for this article was a post by Joel Spolsky entitled Can your programming language do this? which details one of the advantages JS has over Java.

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Something which has annoyed me of late is the up-surge in mad theories revolving around the Mirror of Erised showing Harry where the Horcruxes are hidden. The basic idea is that Harry just has to really want to find a Horcrux, look in the mirror and then he'll see where it is. This theory is ludicrous for a number of reasons which I'll happily share with you.

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This is the first post to my new blog since I moved it from www.minds.nuim.ie/~voyager/blog to here. The move has not been a smooth one because I also moved from using the Serendipity blog software to WordPress. ATM all my old posts are here but many have not imported perfectly and all the comments were lost. I’ll be fixing the posts over the next while and I haven’t quite given up on find a way to get the comments across but the changes are it won’t happen.

I still have some work to do here before I get back up to my normal level of posting but from tomorrow on expect to start seeing new posts again.

I have always assumed that miss-leading your users and making them jump through many hoops is a bad things. MS appear to disagree. Read more

There was a bit of a hubbub at Wimbledon this year with people complaining because the prize money for the Lady’s Championships was less than that for the Men’s. Their argument goes along the basic line that ‘in this day and age’ men and women should be paid the same. At first glance you’d have to agree with these people but on analysis you’ll realise they are being ridiculous. Equality means that men and women should be paid the same for doing the same job. I agree with that 100% and that’s why I agree with the Women’s prize money being less. In the Women’s game it’s best of three sets but the men have to play best of five. In other words, the longest possible ladies game is the same length as the shorted possible men’s game! So, if the women want to be paid the same as the men they should play to five sets too, if not then they have no right to demand equal pay for less work! When it comes to equality it’s all or nothing in my book.

For those of you who have no idea who or what the IE Domain Registry (IEDR) are, they are the people who decided who does and does not get what .ie Internet domain name. You can find out more on their home page. Below is a quote from their front page in which I have bolded the bits that I find particularly positive.

“The IEDR is an independent not-for-profit organisation that manages the .ie country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) namespace in the public interest of the Irish and global Internet communities.

The IE Domain Registry is not a governing or regulatory body, but provides a public service for the .ie namespace on behalf of the Internet community.”

These people have a very important responsibility, they manage the Irish-branded presence on the internet. They literally determine who is good enough to belong to Ireland on the internet. Were they to genuinely live up to the bolded parts of the above quote I would have nothing but praise for them. However, my many experiences with them over many years have lead me to the conclusion that they are falling far short of these ideals. Read more

This is the second part of a series of posts I'm putting together on the various clues I think JKR has scattered throughout the first six books to give us an idea of what will happen in the final book. If you haven't read it yet the first part was about Petigrew's Debt to Harry. This post discusses the second clue which can be found near the end of the fourth book but is very easy to miss. it is literally contained in a single line, but to me that makes it all the more signifficant. Read more

Something I’ve always had a lot of trouble with is developing good colour schemes for web pages. (The fact that I’m rather colour blind does not help matters!) I generally end up falling back to a mono-chrome scheme where the site just uses many different shades of the same single colour. This works but often leads to sites that look a little boring. I need to skin a new web portal at work that I want to make look good and professional to speed up it’s adoption so I decided I just had to get to grips with this colour thing. There is no magic quick fix but here are two links I found in-valuable and that I’m sure will also be a great help for others trying to get to grips with this:

• A page explaining the theory
• A nice interactive web-based colour wheel to help you put it into practice

Was just reading the news headlines on MyYahoo and came across this groan-inducer by Shawn Pogatchnik of the Associated Press in an article about Ireland officially being called Eire from now on:

DUBLIN, Ireland – Ireland is entering a new Eire. The Cabinet of Prime Minister Bertie Ahern agreed Tuesday to use the Republic of Ireland’s Gaelic name (pronounced AIR-uh) during European Union summits.

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