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.
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 :-
- Download the latest version of JMeter from the website http://jakarta.apache.org/
- 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…
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…
Programmers when creating url and page name sometimes create mixed case URL for eg
http://www.skill-guru.com/skill/login/testDetails/12/testName/SCJP-6-Mock-Practice-Test
Now this may be a good programming practice but it is not a good practice from user perspective. Mixed case URLs are an absolute no-no, as Unix and Linux servers are case sensitive. Having mixed case URLs drastically increases the possibility of typos . It is always difficult for users to remember the url (if they can).
So try to keep all your url’s in lower case.
What is Selenium ?
Selenium is an open source, robust set of tools that supports rapid development of test automation for web-based applications. This tool is primarily developed in Java Script and browser technologies and hence supports all the major browsers on all the platforms. Most of the time, we will not need to change our scripts for them to work on other platforms. Selenium provides a record/playback tool for authoring tests without learning a test scripting language.
Selenium Components
There are three variants of Selenium, which can be used in isolation or in combination to create complete automation suite for the web applications. Each one has a specific role in aiding the development of web application test automation.
We have heard a lot about HTML5 in last couple of weeks. Apple does not want to go with flash technology and are adopting HTML5 as the new standard. Scribd has ditched flash in favor of HTML5.
Sounds pretty exciting huh !!
So let us dump what we have and start developing in HTML5.
Nope not so fast . Hold on to your hour horses. Yes it is true that HTML5 is becoming the new standard . But at this stage neither all the browsers are ready for HTML5 , nor the clients would be ready with new browsers. So you might have a new website/application built in HTML 5 , using new tags but the clients are still with IE6 !!
You do not want to land in this situation.
Aditya Yadav’s interview on Info q Deploying HTML 5, talks about some of issues around this new standard and he has put together an excellent table detailing compatibility level of each browser with HTML5 features.
