Email is part and parcel of our life. Ever wondered how a mail reaches you or ever seen a mail header for the trace of its path? Here is a good article “Tracing an Email” that helps you look at the email headers in popular email engines and explains how to trace the sender.

Is it going to be Ruby (on Rails) or Java (and J2EE)? Which one is going to be the future hot technology? Well these questions always remain irrespective of some technology is hot at present or in the future. When it comes to Rails or J2EE for web applications there has been interesting discussions and the question from the Java community has always been what about enterprise class applications and scalability of Rails applications? While there is no concrete answers to these questions here is a good interview in OnJava on “Ruby the rival?” The interview is given by leading experts in the J2EE arena who have recently also got into Ruby and Rails and they answer the above questions.

For a rich user interface on a web application there is a lot of JavaScript to be handled and one has to be knowledgeable in Document Object Model (DOM). Simply put think of DOM as a tree structure representation of one single web page. A single web page screen is a document and is the parent element of this structure. Following it are the various elements that form the children and their offshoots like a tree family. Using this tree as base the DOM can be traversed, manipulated programmatically with the help JavaScript. DHTML is also a way of accessing and manipulating these elements. With DOM a standard script can be developed that will most likely work in any browser that implements W3C DOM. The recent versions of all popular browsers implement the W3C DOM and this can reduce a lot of browser incompatibility issues. If you are new to handling DOM through JavaScript here is a good starting point article “JavaScript and the Document Object Model” from IBM developerWorks.

The User Interface specialist for web application has a key role these days.  With more and more web 2.0 applications coming into picture and there is a tough competition on the look and feel aspect of the application apart from usability.  And when it comes to look and feel colors play a most important tool.  If you are a UI specialist in web applications then probably you should check out this cool tool from Adobe labs called Kuler (requires Flash 9).  Kuler will just help you play around and choose the color combinations for your site. Check out the popular and highly rated ones.

This is a creative ad from Toyota. Human touch redefined.

Happy Weekend!

Don’t have time or don’t want to install anything but learn the Ruby programming language? Here is a really cool site “Try Ruby!” that gives you a feel of ruby in 15 mins. The interactive online session allows you to experiment ruby statements with the help of self instructing tutorial everything within the browser. No sweat! Once you get a feel of it you can always download Ruby and get going. You can get the author’s book “Whys Poignant Guide to Ruby” to learn more of Ruby.

Happy Saturday.

As we are so much deeply engrossed into this computer era we often (as an IT professional) look more as empowering technology rather the other way round. I think a primary thought that technology empowering our lives should constantly be in our mind as we contribute technical solutions that make lives easy. That is what struck me when I stumbled upon this product “IntelliScanner^TM“, that helps keep track of list of items you need to buy from the super market. As bar codes are common these days most of the consumer products come with it. This black and white strip helps in identifying the details of the product. It makes life easier to have such a device at home to just keep track of the brand of products you regularly use and that can keep track of the items to be purchased next time you go to a super market.

In web applications if there is a requirement to protect the site to restricted users or groups of users there are different ways to achieve it. The traditional way of doing it is to have it the program way, to have the users and group information stored in a database and providing a login page to allow a user to login. The user credential is authenticated and the application authorizes him/her access to features and functionalities based on the privileges available to him/her. All these information comes from the data store which could again be administered and managed through separate programs or part of the same application. The user administration will have to be part of the requirement and will require effort implementing through program code.

With declarative security, the application server container takes care of protecting resources of the web application through roles, authorization and group management and appropriately restricts the user from getting into or accessing specific pages in the web site. J2EE certified application servers support declarative security. The authorization details can be mentioned through the web deployment descriptor (web.xml). The Weblogic resource “Declarative Security” has some insights on using web.xml to protect the resources. The security chapter in J2EE tutorial is also a good resource to understand declarative security. The best way to have an efficient security is to have a combination of security approaches as this article “Declarative Web Application Security with Servlets and JSP” explains it with samples.