While I had been working in j2ee enterprise application, the SEO friendly url’s was never an objective. It was never required that each page should have a unique bookmarkable url.

But things change completely in world wide web world. SEO is hot . All the pages should have a unique user friendly url.

In Skill-Guru although we had unique url for the test pages, they were never user friendly. Our url’s were like

http://www.skill-guru.com/skill/login/getAllTestsByCategory.faces?cagtegoryId=1&cagtegoryName=Certification

http://www.skill-guru.com/skill/login/fetchRelatedTestsPosts.faces?tag=scjp

So we took the project of re architecting the application to have a clean , user friendly , bookmarkable url.  We looked at couple of options like url rewriting in .htaccess file on the server.

Then we discovered pretty faces.  Pretty faces utility has been written by Lincoln Baxter. This makes life so much easier for application developer . It also left the control with the developer to manage the url within the application instead of managing on server.

I am not going into details of pretty faces as Lincoln has done an excellent job on documentation. Now the url’s in our application are user freindly.

http://www.skill-guru.com/cat/sat-practice-test

http://www.skill-guru.com/test/79/passage-based-reading-test-1

Thanks to pretty faces we now have pretty URL’s.

Satish Talim , author of Clojure for beginners is offering its free ebook to folks who want to get started with Clojure programming. Send an email to satish.talim [ a ] gmail.com to get your free book.

JMeter is a desktop application used to load test functional behavior and measure performance. It is used to test performance both on static and dynamic resources (files, Servlets, Perl scripts, Java Objects, Data Bases and Queries, FTP Servers and more).

JMeter supports HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SOAP, POP3, JDBC, thus enabling its use to test most of the applications. It has record and playback capability which enables easy test case creation. But, it can directly record only HTTP requests and supports HTTPS spoofing which is not completely reliable.

Steps to setup JMeter and create test plan :-

1. Download the latest version of JMeter from the website http://jakarta.apache.org/
2. Run the batch file in JMeter folder -> bin -> jmeter.bat

Below is the snap shot of the Apache JMeter Tool.

Read more…

In our last post , Getting started with JSF , we had covered JSF1.2.  JSF has come a long way from that.  JSF 2 has come with very new features, some of them taken from different frameworks / components.  Now JSF developers don’t have to look out. JSF2 helps JSF developers to keep their application simple.
There are many articles explaining new features of jsf 2. But here in this blog, I brief you some of the features:

1. The introduction of  View scopes, flash scope and custom scope - View scopes,Flash scopes and custom scopes are ‘bigger than request scope but smaller than session scope’. Many times developers are forced to keep objects in session scope just because they want the objects available till end of their front view operation or make them work in the redirection or till end of their front end operation.  For example you might have experienced implementing edit/delete/ add operations to datatable,  many times its necessary to make the bean session scope to make it working right way. This can be avoided by view scope variables. The custom scope helps objects to be available till end of user operation (user has to decide the scope of bean). This is like flow scope.Flow scopes were offered by frameworks like spring webflow etc .. But for an application already done in JSF, it is easier to shift to JSF2 than webflow.
Read more…

Web based application beyond a size become complex to manage. Page definitions,  managing application flow , state management , orchestration of all this become a difficult task. That is why we have frameworks to ease out this task for us.

One of the choices which come to mind is Spring webflow.  Spring webflow is for management of page flow , navigation and state management. It is not an full fledged MVC framework like JSF 2.0 or Apache Struts.

You might get confused by the definition of Spring webflow on its home page

Spring Web Flow is the project in the Spring Portfolio that focuses on providing the infrastructure for building and running rich web applications. As a Spring project, Web Flow builds on the Spring Web MVC framework to provide: Read more…

NEJUG on Thu, Jun 10, will feature Greg Brown presenting on Apache Pivot and we will be at Sun Microsystems Burlington , MA.

Presentation Overview:

Apache Pivot (http://pivot.apache.org) is a platform for building rich Internet applications (RIAs) in Java. It combines the enhanced productivity and usability features of a modern RIA toolkit with the robustness of the industry-standard Java platform. Pivot includes a number of features that significantly simplify development of modern GUI applications, including an XML markup language for declaring the structure of a user interface, data binding, animated effects and transitions, and Web services integration.

In this session, Pivot founders Greg Brown and Todd Volkert provide an overview of the Pivot platform and walk through the implementation of a simple but practical application that highlights key platform features and development best practices.

About the presenter:

Greg Brown is a senior software architect with 15 years of experience developing applications in both a services and R&D capacity. He is the founder and PMC Chair of Apache Pivot, an open source platform for building rich Internet applications in Java. He holds a bachelor?s degree in Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

This question has come up again time and again if sitemaps are really important and do they help in boosting up your rankings. I am not sure how will it affect your rankings but a sitemap does help search engine to crawl your site and understand all the links. Some SEO’s do claim that sitemaps do help in boosting your rankings.

If your site is dynamic website and has new contents being churned out frequently , sitemaps are really important.

Quoting google webmaster

Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

• Your site has dynamic content.
• Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process – for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash.
• Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

I will give one example of sitemaps in dynamic websites. Sites like  Stackoverflow have a sitemap.xml file is created which contains a link to every question posted on the system. When a new question is posted, they simply append another entry to the end of the sitemap file. Read more…

Wordpress is yet to release version 3.0 and there are some major enhancements coming up. Some important changes

Merge of WordPress MU + WordPress.org

Header Panel in WordPress 3.0

WordPress 3.0 Background Customization

Link Shortener

One of the new features which I really like is the ability to customize header using header cpanel. For the reader of Skill-Guru , you might have noticed that although we are using iNove them , we had to change header and footer in lines with our site. These new features would definitely help us out in customization of your blog

More details here at sixrevisions.