jspx daily press

IE 9 issue with Arabic

2011-03-15T11:34:00.001+02:00

Have you tried IE9? well, it is released, and you can download from here

It is cool however, an obvious bug is seen while using Arabic text. Here is a sample HTML

<html>

<head>

title>

head>

اقرأ كل الاخبار

span>

body>

html>

And this should produce the following:

And that what is obtained

To solve this, simply use on of the two style not both of them.

<span style="font-family: arial;">

اقرأ كل الاخبار

span>

OR

<span style="font-style: italic;>

اقرأ كل الاخبار

span>

way to GO IE9!

Jspx Build 1.1.0

2011-02-19T18:08:00.002+02:00

Jspx build 1.1.0 is released. new features are added, few bugs are solved. and brand new demo project is added. here are the new release notes of the build.

http://jspx-bay.sourceforge.net

What is new in jspx 1.1.0?

JSPX build 1.1.0 is an improvements in both UI and internal functionalities. It introduces many new features. Along with support for JBoss 5.1.0 and MySQL.

New Demo project is added.

Build 1.1.0 vs. 1.0.10

New Features:

1. Support JBoss 5.1.0

2. Support MySQL DB.

3. Validations UI Improvements.

4. Calendar UI improvements.

5. DataTable has a Flickr like pagination.

6. Sortable columns will have a default icon.

7. Accepts any HTML outside the tag

Bugs Fixed:

1. Remove NullPointerException in case the href is empty in anchor control.

2. Supporting mailto in the anchor href.

Case Senstive DBMS

2010-12-13T12:56:00.005+02:00

DataTable

Is a powerful Web Control that is connecting directly to the DB making full management of data without no single line of codes. DataTable is using plain sql statement that it has a place holders for parameters and variables.

Now let's consider the following SQL statement to run on MySql DB.

SELECT (g.NAME) AS g_name, (m.NAME) AS m_name, gen.NAME AS c_gender,

bdb.NAME bdb_name, c.*

FROM dcs.customer c,

dcs.grade g,

dcs.martial_status m,

dcs.gender gen,

dcs.boolean_db bdb

WHERE c.grade = g.ID

AND c.martial_status = m.ID

AND c.gender = gen.ID

AND bdb.ID = c.deleted

AND c.ID = custid

AND passport_num LIKE '%pass%'

AND c.NAME LIKE '%custName%'

AND phone LIKE '%custPhone%'

AND gender = custgender

AND (creation_date) >=str_to_date ('from_date 00:00:00', '%e/%m/%Y %H:%i:%s')

AND (creation_date) <=str_to_date ('to_date 23:59:59', '%e/%m/%Y %H:%i:%s')

AND job LIKE '%custJob%'

AND grade = custgrade

AND martial_status = custmart

AND deleted = custdel

AND (birth_date) >= str_to_date ('from_Bdate', '%e/%m/%Y')

AND (birth_date) <= str_to_date ('to_Bdate', '%e/%m/%Y')

The highlighted conditions are used to limit the search to certain date window. The problem that the date formatter in Oracle is different than MySQL. in MySQL the formatter is case senstive. i.e. %Y is different than %y. Full description of the date formatting can found here

Jspx DataParam is used to inject user values into the place holders in the SQL statement. To do that, DataParam converts the Expression [ (birth_date) >= str_to_date ('from_Bdate', '%e/%m/%Y') ] to lower case, then replaces the variable [ from_Bdate] with the value . Changing the case will cause the format to work differently on MySQL. That when we decided to make the replacement case sensitive which will work for both MySql and Oracle. This simply make it difficult to developer as he has to write the DataParam attributes (Expression, name) case identical.

In order to solve this, a new Boolean attribute caseSensitive is added to the DataTable to decide if the Expression will be case sensitive or not. As usual, this parameter has a default value to false, which means that it will be backward compatible with what you have done before.

If this attribute is set to true, then your expression should contain the place holder variable as the same case as the name attribute.

<dataparam name="from_Bdate" control="bdFrom" id="dp1" expression="(BIRTH_DATE) >= STR_TO_DATE('from_Bdate','%e/%m/%Y')"/>

in case there a casing diffrence, you will get the exception

DataParam [dp1] has the Expression [(BIRTH_DATE) >= STR_TO_DATE('from_Bdate','%e/%m/%Y')] that does not contain the name [from_bdate] Please make sure of the name exists and match case

Despite that fact that this attribute caseSensitive is related to the DataParam behavior, it is a property in DataTable. The reason for that, is that this property is consistent over the DB. So why it is not a property a cross the application instead of repeating it on every DataTable? The answer is, this will allow to have your application connecting to different DBMS (Oracle, MySQL) based on your DataTable.

DeniedRoles

2010-11-23T09:47:00.000+02:00

Jspx integrates with JAAS APIs providing an easy to use Authentication/Authorization module. Full Details about this can be found here jaas-on-web-control-level

In the currently under developing build, jspx has added new attribute to both Page and WebControl.

DeniedRoles

This attribute can be used the same way as AllowedRoles has been used. So, if the value is set to * then no one can access this Page/Control.

A list of Roles can be concatenated to the value like DeniedRoles="System Admin,Super User,Guest"

This will allow all users does not have any of the roles listed above.

This new attribute is planned to be released on the upcomming build of Jspx.

MySQL 5.1

2010-11-03T10:37:00.000+02:00

DataTable is a powerful control that is connecting to DB directly. Business cases like search, add, edit and delete from a DB table can be implemented without single line of Java Code.

Jspx is being tested against MySQL DB. DataTable worked fine with normal quires like

However, with quires like this,

SELECT (g.NAME) AS g_name, (m.NAME) AS m_name,

(CASE c.gender

WHEN 1

THEN 'male'

WHEN 2

THEN 'female'

ELSE c.gender

END

) AS c_gender,

c.*

FROM dcs.customer c, dcs.grade g, dcs.martial_status m

WHERE c.grade = g.ID

AND c.martial_status = m.ID

AND ID = custid

AND passport_num LIKE '%pass%'

AND NAME LIKE '%custName%'

AND phone LIKE '%custPhone%'

AND gender = custgender

AND TRUNC (creation_date) >= str_to_date ('from_date', '%d/%m/%Y')

AND TRUNC (creation_date) <= str_to_date ('to_date', '%d/%m/%Y')

AND job LIKE '%custJob%'

AND grade = cutgrade

AND martial_status = custmart

AND deleted = custdel

we noticed that it could not retrieval the full columns returned. To know the reason, let's dive under the Hood, while JSPX is executing the search SQL, it constructs a hashmap of the returned records

public static List<Hashtable<String, DataField>> search(String datasource, String sql, int start, int size) throws Exception

where the DataField is storing the column name , type and value. The hash map representing one record of the result set is indexed by the column name.

Inside the above method, the column name is retrieved as

if (resultSet.absolute(start + 1))

{

int colCount = resultSet.getMetaData().getColumnCount();

{

cols = new Hashtable<String, DataField>();

for (int i = 1; i <= colCount; i++)

{

fieldName = resultSet.getMetaData().getColumnName(i).trim().toLowerCase();

cols.put(fieldName, new DataField(fieldName, resultSet.getObject(i)));

}

rows.add(cols);

}

while (resultSet.next() && (++counter < size));

}

The method getColumnName(i) in MySQL JDBC driver returns the original name of the column instead of the alias name in the SQL statement, so assume you have table Customer with column "NAME" and you have table JOB with Filed "NAME".
Creating aliasing for the filed "NAME" in JOB Table as "JOB_NAME" will return the column "NAME" from JOB table under the label "JOB_NAME". But JSPX will get "NAME" as the name of the column.

Instead of this method we used the getColumnLabel(i) method to get the correct name of the column.

JBoss 5 getResourceAsStream

2010-11-01T21:33:00.002+02:00

Recently I was testing JSPX on JBoss 5.1.0. The first thing we encountered is the failure of getting Resource Bundles or Message Bundles.

To get to that deeply, we need to know that JSPX is accessing resource files within the WAR/EAR file. The best example on that, the jspx HTML pages themselves.

The other need to access resources when loading resource Bundle. Embedded resources inside JSPX like javascript files and images are also accessed as resources.

When we moved to JBoss 5.1.0, we discovered that JSPX pages are opened normally however the resource bundles are not.

After check the source we found out that they are using different techniques:

1. Loading the JSPX Pages located in the WebContent. They are loaded using the Servlet Context context.getResourceAsStream(resourceName);
The embedded resources and bundles are loaded by
asResourceUtility.class.getResourceAsStream(resourceName);

And this used to work on JBoss 4.2.2 but now it is no on JBoss 5.1.0. we simply tried to use the servlet context to load everything, but it did not work for jspx embedded reources as they are inside the jspx jar.

It seems that JBoss separates the classpath of the loaded jars and web app. so using context to load embedded resources did not work. so it had to stay as it is. and the resource bundles to be loaded by servlet context.

jspx jar dependency

2010-06-29T14:29:00.002+03:00

Jspx is requiring the following jars in case there is a business need.

commons-fileupload-1.2.1.jar (when using File Upload)
log4j-1.2.15.jar (Mandatory for logging)
poi-3.1-FINAL-20080629.jar (when using Export To Excel)
servlet-api.jar
commons-io-1.3.1.jar (when using File Upload)

Jspx Documentation

2010-06-28T22:34:00.000+03:00

Many questions about jspx documentation. Well, we do have a documentation.

check out the following link

http://jspx-bay.sourceforge.net/index.html?l=pages/tout/doc.html

jspx at MEAOSS

2010-06-17T15:23:00.001+03:00

jspx went public again at MEA OSS Forum http://www.meaossforum.com/overview, the first Middle East and African Open Source Software Forum.

jspx was well received by the audience. In the conference I met Sally Khudiri from Apache. She is a so sweet person.

Jspx on Softpedia

2010-05-27T09:54:00.000+03:00

Jspx has just hit http://www.softpedia.com . The framework was added to MAC and Linux section. Windows section is to follow.

here is the image from MAC section

http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Development/Java/jspx.shtml

and this is from Linux.
http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Internet/HTTP-WWW-/JSPX-57080.shtml

Internet Explorer cannot download

2010-05-23T20:29:00.001+03:00

In web development, sometimes it is required to download documents to the client. These documents may not be physically existing on the file system, however they are in other place like DB, that is requiring problematically extract the document then send it to the client.

Jspx provides a common method to write files directly to the client.

public
void writeFile(byte[] file, String fileName, String mimeType)

This method can be called from any jspx controller.

In some application that is using SSL for HTTPS interface. we noticed that if the client side is IE then we got the following error.

Internet Explorer cannot download Internet Explorer was not able to open this Internet site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later.

We googled the web for such error and ended with the result that is described here

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;q316431&

we had to remove both header (Pragma, Cache-Control)

so we did that in the writeFile method and now it look like this:

public void writeFile(byte[] file, String fileName, String mimeType)

{

try

{

this.response.setHeader("Content-disposition", "attachment; filename=" + fileName);

this.response.setContentType(mimeType);

// [May 23, 2010 4:51:08 PM] [Amr.ElAdawy] [removing the caching control headers

// in order to solve the https problem]

this.response.setHeader("Pragma", null);

this.response.setHeader("Cache-Control", null);

OutputStream out = this.response.getOutputStream();

out.write(file);

out.close();

}

catch (IOException e)

{

e.printStackTrace();

}

catch (Exception e)

{

logger.error("Excpetion while writing file file ", e);

}

this.skip();

}

which had solved the problem

cheers,

Video: jspx jdc 2010 Demo

2010-03-02T07:48:00.003+02:00

Video: Full video for getting started

2010-03-02T07:37:00.001+02:00

Video: Getting Started with Jspx

2010-03-01T03:49:00.001+02:00

How Was it?

2010-03-01T03:39:00.003+02:00

Well, it was strange day.

I had fun and some bad moments. I was very tired. I was well received.

soo many things.

I will be talking about all of that very soon but I will leave you with two video demos

30 minutes to rule

2010-02-10T16:27:00.001+02:00

Have you checked the JDC 2010 agenda, if not yet you can see it here.

Jspx has been enrolled to run starting from 12:30 to 1:00. only for 30 minutes right after the first coffee break..

also on the second track, Ahmed Hashim will be conducting a parallel session.

Well, it is a bit of challenge, to conduct the jspx fully in 30 minutes. But we are working on that.

I hope to allocate time to work on the presentation for the event.

___

How Difficult would it be for a plugin?

2010-02-08T12:24:00.001+02:00

Have you searched for jspx on google? google.com/jspx
You may encounter the jspx Wikipedia page on the first or the second hit.

In this page, the limitation section is mentioning the absence of IDE support for JSPX as a major obstacle. I agree.

Jspx is developed and used on Eclipse. However, there is no support for JSPX on Eclipse. We had been thinking of this since a lot. But we never come to find a time or a resource to do that support.

During our preparation for JDC 2010 the question jumped again. When will we see an eclipse plug-in for jspx?

We started making the plug-in!!! but will be any help from the community?
We are not looking from something very powerful, just a way to do the following

Validate the XHTML of jspx tags and attributes (We already have XSD)
Link the HTML Editor to the Java controller.
Optionally creates back-end controls for any selected HTML element on the HTML page.

We are not sure if we can manage to have something solid before JDC 2010 but we are on the road.

any ideas?

Conversation Scope Jspx Bean

2010-01-25T09:53:00.002+02:00

Jspx bean is a very powerful feature in Jspx. Most of the time in web development; developer is required to link between Model and View. Sometimes this link is read only (Displaying Model extracted from Data Layer) or Read/Write (Collecting Data from the user in the View Layer and pass it to the Data Layer for persistence).

More Info about the Jspx Bean is found here

A very famous Business case is Form Entry like customer registration; where user fills in a form to compose a model. In such case the size of the Model properties is a factor in complexity of the development.

Jspx provides Jspx Bean to create the Read/Write Link between View and Model. In many different cases it is required to maintain the Model Data for later use. In some cases like a wizard, where the user is prompted through different steps; data entered should be maintained till the end of the wizard.

Initially Jspx provided to Maintainability Scopes (Session, Request).

The Request Scope is the default Scope for a bean. In Request Scope, the Bean is only life during one post-back cycle. So when the page is rendered the bean is destroyed.

The Session Scope is used to keep the bean live for a longer time. A bean has a Session Scope is visible by all other controllers in the project. Controller can share the same Session Scope Jspx Bean already declared by declaring a Session Bean with the same name.

However, a problem may occur due to the conflict of the name. Also, in case of wizards, the beans should be declared as Session Beans. This violates the concept of multi threading in a web application. As if the end user opens different windows on the wizard, he will be ending overriding the same bean.

For such a problem, the Conversation Scope Bean is used. The concept of Conversation is introduced as a solution for the problem of sharing beans in Session Scope and the stateless problem of the Request Scope.

Conversation scope beans are only visible to the pages that are declaring this bean. Other instant of the page or the wizard will create new instant of the bean with fresh values.

What about moving from one page to another? In a wizard example, the Developer should advance the user to the next page using dispatching dispatch(String newPage), rather than the redirecting. The target page should also declare a Conversation Scope Jspx Bean with the same name. By this way, the framework will populate the bean with the value of the bean in the previous page.

Still there is a drawback for such feature that is the fact that Conversation Beans are stored in the User HTTP Session. So for N number of times the user opens a page declaring a Conversation Bean, a new instant is created and stored in the session.

Cleaning up the Conversation Scope beans is not automatically done. So the developer should call the clearJspxBean(String jspxBeanName) at the end of the conversation in order to remove the Bean from the Session.

Follow Jspx on JDC 2010

2010-01-23T17:35:00.000+02:00

http://jdc2010.egjug.org

Check/Select

2009-11-19T12:15:00.000+02:00

One of the most power features of Jspx is Table Control. There are two types of Tables

DataTable

Bind directly to DB.
Commits action directly to DB

ListTable

Bind to Collection of Objects.
Commit Changes to Memory Objects.

Inside a Table you may need to show a check box to make the end user able to select some items and then perform some actions on them later. Adding Check box to table is very easy.

type="check" checkType="all" />

This will add a new column in the table with check box in the header and a check box in each row. Which enables end user to select different items from the table. In case the user needed to select all the rows, he can simply click on the header check box. Now jspx will automatically disable all the check boxes in the table indicating that the whole rows were selected.

Some people complained about it. They say that they wanted to selected All then unselect some single rows. This requires changes in the data column command control. As jspx preserves backward compatibility it was required to introduce the new behavior while keeping the old one.

This was accomplished by the new attribute selectType , this attribute has one of two values:

Select

This is the default value.
It acts the same way as current.

Check

This is the new behavior.
The check boxes in each row will be check and uncheck instead of being disabled.

The HTML will look like this

type="check" checkType="all" selectType="check" />

By this, the old code is maintained and the new feature is supported!

JSPX on SourceForge

2009-11-16T15:39:00.000+02:00

JSPX on SourceForge Now has mirror domain

http://jspx.sourceforge.net
https://sourceforge.net/projects/jspx

Jspx Dependency Injection

2009-10-09T21:52:00.002+02:00

Jspx is up to latest java technologies, Dependency Injection is now used to
less the amount of code in the controller. Dependency Injection is used for better
and maintainable applications. Since the beginning of the framework, Jspx is always
aiming at removing boilerplate code.

Jspx Controller

Developing web application using Jspx is relatively easier than other frameworks; however the efforts for providing much simpler and easier did not stop just there. As we saw in the demo, interacting with HTML controls declared in view code (HTML file) requires declaring server side java controls for each of them.

Assume that we have a page with input field [UserName], if you want to interact with this control from java code in the page controller, and then you have to do the following:

HTML control with a given id i.e. userName
Java instant of TextBox class.
This instant should have a name the same as the id given to the HTML control.
This inst ant should not be null.
This instant should have getter and setter.

Any missing step of these five steps will not link the HTML control to the java control and will make any changes applied to the server side control will not be reflected to the end user. Also any initial values set in the HTML page will not be visible.
Despite the fact how simple these steps are, there are several issues:

There has to be a lot of code that is irrelevant to the business logic.
The name of the getters and setter should match the id of the control
The coupling between HTML and java is limiting the flexibility of refactoring.
Initializing controls has a negative impact on performance.

The solution for this aimed at removing all these issues through simple way of declaring jspx web controls and also to remove the coupling. The solution was to simply declare the control in the page as following

As you notice a new annotation [JspxWebControl] is used to annotate the declared control.
There is no need for any getters or setters for the control.
There is no need to initialize the control or change its visibility.

You may be wondering how this would clear the coupling between the id of the html control and the name of the declared object. The answer would be through using the annotation to use attributer [name] to set it to the id of the HTML control in the HTML page.

Now if the id of the HTML control changes, this will require only changing the value of the name attribute, also any refactoring in the java control will not require any change.

Dependency Injection is then used to inject the declared control with the HTML control declared in the HTML page. So at runtime, this declared control will not be null and any changes applied to the rendered HTML control.

jspx build 1.0.9

2009-10-06T22:08:00.000+02:00

Jspx Build 1.0.9 has been released. The release notes of the build as following:

What is new in jspx 1.0.9?
JSPX build 1.0.9 comes with new feature and bug fixes. JSPX build 1.0.9 is presenting two very important features (Decency Injection, and SQL Injection prevention).
Along with more features and fixes.

Build 1.0.9 vs. 1.0.7
New Features:
1.    Support OnSubmit event in the form.
2.    Supporting dispatching while using ajax
3.    Using Dependency Injection to declare webcontrols in the page controller.
4.    AllowedRoles on the level of page.
5.    Resource Bundle returns the Key if it was not found.
6.    Internal Carriage in the page for shared Data.
7.    SQL Injection prevention using owasp.esapi http://www.aspectsecurity.com.

Bugs Fixed:
1.    Fixing bug with on click in the link command.
2.    Fixing bug with collapse panel.

Known Issues:
    1- Ajax validation is not working with auto refresh feature, so if the content of auto refreshing panel has a validation group, the validation will be true always.
    2- DataTabel should have PK, if not the edit and delete feature will apply to all records.
    3- Portlet pages cannot post back correctly.

Contact US:
Mail us at:
support DOT jspx AT gmail DOT com
Official Website:
   http://jspx-bay.sourceforge.net
Project Website:
    https://sourceforge.net/projects/jspx-bay

______________________________________________________________-

You can browse all files for Download from here

jspx | Get jspx at SourceForge.net

2009-10-06T13:12:00.004+02:00

jspx | Get jspx at SourceForge.net

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Jspx Bay!

2009-09-25T13:00:00.030+02:00

Jspx as a name is very catchy. The time we chose this name, there were already many other technologies using the name.

Oracle ADF files.
Java Server Documents.

Some people also notice the familiarity between jspx and aspx from asp.net, given that aspx as an extension to the ASP.NET pages was chosen to describe the evolution in the old ASP pages.

Despite aspx is an extension, jspx is the name for the whole technology, jspx also does not impose using specific extension you HTML files unlike ASP.NET.

Many similarities also can be found to different existing frameworks like JSF, Clay, Wickt and of course JSP. What makes it very unique that jspx combines different features and advantages our of these technologies. Also it removes many disadvantages found.

Well, this makes sense for the name, but did u notice the official website url http://jspx-bay.sourceforge.net it contains a suffix BAY that is distinguishing the name from other projects.

The suffix itself stands for the three founder of the framework. Commonly the most used name is JSPX

Ajax Panel Limitations

2009-09-25T01:00:00.003+02:00

In the previous post, we discussed the main strategy behind Ajax support in jspx. In this post we will not go through how to use Ajax in jspx as there is already a good article on the website about using ajax in jspx. you can read it from here.

However, if you follow the release notes of jspx, there is a section for the known issues listed as
    1- Ajax validation is not working with auto refresh feature, so if the content of auto refreshing panel has a validation group, the validation will be true always.
    2- Using dispatch with AjaxPanel will cause displaying the new dispatched page within the AjaxPanel. (Use the post normal feature to overcome this).
    3- DataTabel should have PK, if not the edit and delete feature will apply to all records.
    4- portlet pages cannot post back correctly.

Two points out of four concern Ajax. Let's see more about these points.

The first point is describing an issue with AjaxPanel that has an auto refresh feature. Auto refresh feature is allowing the Panel to periodically refreshing its content. This feature is suitable for news content and any other frequently changing sections in a web page.
The auto refresh is easily applied using the same AjaxPanel tag and just adding tow more attributes

onrefresh the name of the event handler that will be fired when the panel is refreshed.
refreshtime the time in millisecond after which the panel will refresh its content

an example of auto refresh panel is shown below.

Sometimes the HTML within the AjaxPanel has a client side validation. In order to execute validation when an auto refresh panel is used, an extra tag is used
Group which is set to the name of the validation group that will be executed.
More information about validation are found in the jspx website

The issue is that if the form within the auto refresh ajax panel has an invalid data, the validation result will be true and the refresh event will reach the server.

Tracing this issue showed that the validation is fired and the result is false (as expected) but the panel just keep posting !

I think we would give it some time to find out the reason for that.

For the second one, it seems very lazy bug. I member when this first comes out, the solution was very easy that we kept delaying so many times. May be it will be targeted in the upcoming build.

Now let's check out the problem, Using AjaxPanel (Normal, Auto Refresh) will inovke your server side event handling java code. This code may try to dispatch or redirect the user to another page. This action will cause the normal execution of the current page to be overridden and the new page (the user is dispatched to) will be rendered instead, and in case of redirect, the current execution of the page will be skipped also the the redirect code HTTP 302 to be sent to the client targeting the browser to get new resource.

This situation is normally served by the browser in normal posting pages (non-ajax). however when using AjaxPanel, the ajax.js file is taking control of every thing. So let's see what happen if a server side code invoked from an ajax panel is making either redirect or a dispatch.

In case of redirect the response code will be 302 as stated above, hence it is very easily in the javascript receiving the response to check the response code.
If it is 302, then the new location is extracted from the response header and then the current DOM Document location is changed to the new location.

In case of dispatch, the response code will be 200 just like any normal response. This will cause the response content to replace the content of the AjaxPanel fired the event. Which will make a funny look of the page where a different page will be displayed within your original one!

There is a temporary solution to overcome such limitation, which is to force the control that is firing the event to post its data normally instead of Ajax. That solution is very poor in my personal opinion.
Another suggestion is to issue redirect instead of dispatching, causing the page to refresh its content with the new resource. Which I find a penny more than the former solution.

On the jspx level, solving this problem will add extra header in the response flagging a dispatch operation. Hence the script will understand that flag and use the whole response content to replace the whole document.

We did not try this yet, but this may be a solution for such limitation.

Ajax in Jspx

2009-09-24T10:21:00.001+02:00

Since the first time Ajax hit the road, the whole web world just shifted the way the whole things are made. Although the technologies composing Ajax was there far before, the term was coined in 2005. People started to think differently, by people we mean Customers and Providers. Customers now expecting more and Providers are raising the bar.
Just imagine Facebook without ajax. It would be very irritating when every single action requires refreshing the whole page. Imagine that you wall will be refreshed only when you manually refresh the whole page!.

Although ajax is a mandatory feature in almost and every website,Ajax fever started very lately around 2006. Back then, most of the current Web Frameworks were casted and not ready for native support for ajax.

The first support for ajax in ASP.NET was an open source project named Magic Ajax. The name is well describing the tool as the most important criteria about any tool as how clean to use the tool and how clean and unuse it. I have seen a lot of tools with an innovative ideas. But were never used because of the amount of efforts required to use it. Magaic Ajax just were almost simple.

On the other sore in the Java world, JSF introduced rich faces with new set of tags to support rich ajax controls.

Jspx initially did not support ajax, starting from build beta 0.0.11 and beta 0.0.12
till the first final build 1.0.0. The support of ajax was introduced in build 1.0.1.
Supporting ajax in jspx followed the below constraint:

Less efforts to add or remove ajax.
Backward compatibility should be always supported.

The solution was to provide a new control AjaxPanel. This control will be functioning as following:

The HTML controls wrapped within AjaxPanel will be only acting ajaxly.
The content of the AjaxPanel will be only updated when an event is fired from a control within the panel.
Enabling Ajax requires only adding the AjaxPanel tag.
Disabling Ajax requires only removing the AjaxPanel tag.

The above strategy assures the less efforts for supporting ajax in jspx applications.

JAAS on a web control level

2009-09-23T02:01:00.003+02:00

JAAS is a very commonly used standard for Security in J2EE applications. Using JAAS in a web appliction is requiring the following:

Defining set of Roles for the application (web.xml).
Defining Security conistraints for every application resource (web.xml).
Wiring your application to the security module provided by the container (the application server ) like JBoss (jboss-web.xml).

As noticed from the above configurations, the security constraints are applied over the whole resource; a page for example. In practical applications, the page may be a mix of controls that have a different role based functionality. For example, a page my have controls that is visible to normal user. Other controls will be only visible to a moderators, while the rest are only visible to super/admin users.

This mix of different controls make it impossible to choose which role to be applied on the whole page. The solution for such case will be either splitting the controls over different resources and using the appropriate Role with it. The Second solution is to make a very low level access role on the resource (Normal Users) and then using java coding you can show and hide controls based on the principal user.

jspx provides a very easy solution for such problem. Every control in jspx is exposing a non-Standard HTML attribute named AllowedRoles . The value of this attribute is a String. This attribute is listing the allowed roles which is cabaple of viewing the control and firing events.

jspx security features are first introduced in build 1.0.4 along with many other security features that listed here.

Assume that there is a button on page that is resetting the password of the user. This button should be allowed only to users of type admin and super. While the whole page is viewable to normal users, they can not view nor invoke such control.
Using standard JAAS will not solve this issue. But using jspx the solution is simply as following:

<input id="resetPAsswrodButton" type="button" onserverclick="doReset" value="reset password" alloweRoles="admin,super" />

The highlighted attribute lists the rolles allowed separated with comma. When jspx parses this control it does the following two actions:

Renders the control if the current principle in one of the listed roles, else the control is not rendered.
In case of post back action fired by this control, another check is made to make sure that the current principle is allowed to fire the event, else the event is dropped.

The value of this attribute can be set * to allow all roles to access the control, this would be like this
<input id="loginButton" type="button" onserverclick="doLogin" value="signin" alloweRoles="*"/>

The allowed attribtue is also applicable on the level of the jspx page.This is achived through the attribute AllowedRoles in the page tag in the jspx html page.

<page master="/pages/master/site.html" controller="eg.java.jspx.demo.controller.MyPage" alloweRoles="*">
</page>

The Page allowed roles attribute will be available in the upcoming build 1.0.9.

JSPX Press

2009-09-22T16:07:00.000+02:00

Hi,

All over 20 months we been working very hard on the technical side of jspx putting it to more advanced state. We figured out that need more talk about what we already have, given that what we already have is very,very much large to be covered in the currently provided documentations and demos.

Personally I believe in short direct articles that are targeting certain issues and presenting immediate solutions.

In the upcoming series of events we would post different articles and posts for jspx exploring new aspects, features and advantages of such framework.

As the official website is giving much details for an introduction of jspx, we will start from the point after. Spotting lights on more miscellaneous hidden features.

We hope that jspx would be you favorite java webframework for your development.

See you!