Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/02/12
Google published an interesting graph generated from their internal data based on their indexed web pages.
A quick summary of popular encodings based on the graph:
- Unicode – almost 50% and rapidly rising
- ASCII – 20% and falling
- Western European* – 20% and falling
- Rest – 10% and falling
Conclusion: if you do something with the web, make sure you support Unicode.
When you are using Delphi, and need help with transitioning to Unicode: contact me.
–jeroen
* Western European encodings: Windows-1252, ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15.
Reference: Official Google Blog: Unicode nearing 50% of the web.
Edit: 20100212T1500
Some people mentioned (either in the comments or otherwise) that a some sites pretend they emit Unicode, but in fact they don’t.
This doesn’t relieve you from making sure you support Unicode: Don’t pretend you support Unicode, but do it properly!
Examples of bad support for Unicode are not limited to the visible web, but also applications talking to the web, and to webservices (one of my own experiences is explained in StUF – receiving data from a provider where UTF-8 is in fact ISO-8859: it shows an example where a vendor does Unicode support really wrong).
So: when you support Unicode, support it properly.
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, ASP.NET, C#, Database Development, Delphi, Development, Encoding, Firebird, IIS, InterBase, ISO-8859, ISO8859, Prism, SOAP/WebServices, Software Development, SQL Server, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF8, Visual Studio and tools, Web Development | 7 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/02/07
The recently launched Google Chrome 4 introduced plugin support (they call it support for extensions).
Greasemonkey is a scripting plugin allowing you to on-the-fly modify the HTML in your browser. Originally it was Mozilla Firefox only.
On February 1st, Aaron Boodman – the original Geasemonkey developer who now works as Google – announced that Greasmonkey support it is available natively in Google Chrome 4.
There are some 40-thousand scripts available on userscripts.org, lots of them written by people like you and me (from simple things like filling out forms and removing ads to complex stuff like re-layouting complete pages).
The vast majority of those scripts will work in Google just as well as in Firefox, the rest (some 15 to 25 percent) need adaption. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Development, Google Apps, Power User, Software Development, Web Development | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/01/15
These Smashing people provide real concise info.
Note their quite though:
Disclaimer: the things we’ll talk about in this article today won’t make you a security expert, just as buying a Swiss Army knife won’t make you a locksmith or buying a whip won’t make you a lion tamer. The purpose here is to raise awareness and perhaps make some of that security mumbo-jumbo a bit more understandable to you.
Web Security: Are You Part Of The Problem? – Smashing Magazine.
Posted in CSS, Development, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2010/01/14
In todays fusion of Web 2.0 and mobile users, performance is key again.
The below article by Christian Heilmann explains the what and how of improving your website performance.
It contains references to the current tools that help you measure and improve performance.
The article also references some interesting videos, and people that lead in performance improvement.
Recommended reading!
Quote:
Even if you don’t have millions of users (yet), consider one very important thing: people are consuming the Web nowadays less with fat connections and massive computers and more with mobile phones over slow wireless and 3G connections, but they still expect the same performance. Waiting for a slow website to load on a mobile phone is doubly annoying because the user is usually already in a hurry and is paying by the byte or second. It’s 1997 all over again.
Website Performance: What To Know and What You Can Do – Smashing Magazine.
–jeroen
Posted in CSS, Development, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2009/12/09
Today, I bumped into something utterly strange: requests replayed through Fiddler 2 to a locally running ASP.NET Development Server on Vista using localhost URLs did not give a connection.
I use ASP.NET from both C# and Delphi Prism. Most of my development work is on Windows XP (see notes below) but I test on many platforms.
Moving one of the projects from XP to Vista, and testing with Fiddler, I found that when using Fiddler 2:
This form of URL fails on Vista, but works on XP: http://localhost:49703
This form of URL works both on Vista, and XP: http://127.0.0.1:49703
So on Vista – contrary to XP – localhost requests from Fiddler were in fact being sent to the external network adapter on Vista, and the 127.0.0.1 requests to the internal network adapter.
Since the ASP.NET Development Server is bound only to the internal network adapter, external requests don’t work (boy, I wish they did, it would make some of my debugging so much easier!).
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in .NET, ASP.NET, C#, Delphi, Development, Fiddler, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, Prism, Software Development, Web Development | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2009/11/09
This just had this happen on a Windows 2003 server with a client’s client.
Any .asmx page would return a 404 error like this IIS log line shows:
2009-11-06 09:46:05 127.0.0.1 GET /MyVirtualDirectory/MyWebService.asmx – 80 – 127.0.0.1 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.2;+SV1;+.NET+CLR+1.1.4322;+.NET+CLR+2.0.50727;+.NET+CLR+3.0.4506.2152;+.NET+CLR+3.5.30729) 404 2 1260
Searching for “iis 404 2 1260 asp.net” found this top from Marc Valk, that solved the issue: ASP.NET v2.0.5727 was prohibited to run.
Which means that none of the ASP.NET bound extensions would work: they all returned 404 errors.
(Note: if you are wondering where your IIS log files are, this post shows you).
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, ASP.NET, Development, IIS, SOAP/WebServices, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2009/09/29
Nick Hodges just posted he has become the tpfsadmin on sourceforge: the administrative account for the Turbo Power tools and libraries.
It is not an officially sponsored Embarcadero thing, but at best semi official.
However, it is an admirable step into getting the Turbo Power tools and libraries updated in one central place again.
Those tools include OnGuard, Orpheus, SysTools, FlashFiler, B-TreeFiler, Async Professional and many others.
So if you have your own fork of any of the Turbo Power code from sourceforge, then please drop Nick a note.
Many thanks to Nick!
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, Database Development, Delphi, Development, Software Development, Source Code Management, SourceForge, Web Development | 6 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2009/09/21
Since bandwitdth for a lot of users can still be an issue*, it pays off to make your web-pages as light-weight as possible.
When using JavaScript and/or CSS in your sites, you can compress them to save bandwidth.
A good compressor for this is the YUI Compressor, which can compress both JavaScript and CSS.
* Bandwidth can be an issue for instance for people having only GPRS, EDGE or UMTS/3G access, or countries where DSL and cable are not abundant.
Posted in CSS, Development, Software Development, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2009/09/10
Every now and then I need the ASP.NET RegularExpressionValidator control to validate some user input on a web-page using .NET Regular Expressions (which are very similar to regular expressions used in other languages and frameworks).
Somehow, I have lost loads of time because many of the hits on Google show up high in the results, but do not actually help that much.
So I decided to put up a bunch of links to pages that I think are relevant, or helped me much.
This list is not definitive: please comment when you have links to better information!
Note: this list is current at the instant of the latest edit timestamp: tools might have improved (or disappeared) since then.
Opnions are mine; if you do not agree: please convince me why.
Tools
Regular Expression builder applications
- Expresso – free .NET WinForms application to visually build and test regular expressions (free registraion required after 60 days of trial usage)
- RegexWorkbench – free .NET WinForms application to build and test regular expressions (much more rudimentary than Expresso)
Regular Expression test applications
- RegexLib tester – free on-line regular expresion tester where you can choose the client platform (.NET/ClientSide/SilverLight)
- The Regulator – free .NET WinForms application to test regular expressions with built in support for RegexLib.com
- The Regex Coach – free LISP Windows application to test regular expressions and tries to explain them in plain english
- RegExPal – free on-line JavaScript regular expression tester (tests the client side only)
- ReWork – free on-line JavaScript tester with samples in JavaScript/PHP/Python/Ruby
- RegexDesigner.NET – free .NET WinForms application to test regular expressions and generate C#/VB.NET code from them (ot really a “Designer” after all and much less sophisticated than The Regulator)
Tools lists
Tools not worth looking at
- Regulazy – too rudimentary
Sites/Documentation/Examples
Some comments on common regular expression solutions
- RegEx for email usuaully reject valid email adresses like jeroen+info@pluimers.subdomain.info
Dominic has some very nice info on validating email adresses
- RegEx for a minimum number of characters usually contain \w, which is not any character!
Better use ^(.{6,})$ than ^(\w{6,})$ if you want a minimum length of 6 characters.
Bugs
Posted in .NET, ASP.NET, Development, Encoding, JavaScript/ECMAScript, LISP, RegEx, Scripting, Software Development, Unicode, Web Development | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 