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    Taking Advantage of Spring MVC's Default Behavior

    Over the last several months I have worked on several content heavy websites for one of our partners. When I say “content heavy”, I mean that 80%-90% of the pages in the application are static, or at least mostly static, a customer name, membership number, etc may need to be...
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    Magento Customization

    Magento is an e-commerce framework that is used as an online shopping cart. I am going to talk a little bit about Magento extensions and why they are useful when wanting to customize your shopping cart. Magento extensions allow you to change functionality of the shopping cart while modifying little...
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    Automating the Web with WWW::Mechanize

    And yes, the double colon does mean Perl. However, I know that Python also has the same class modeled after the Perl module. So even if py- is your favorite prefix, this should still be useful. WWW::Mechanize gives you basic access to a "web browser" from your Perl scripts. It has...
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    Hibernate Embeddable Objects

    Hibernate Embeddable Objects are a really neat way to organize your data model.  Especially, if you have the same few columns in a number of different tables, that all pertain to the same thing. The example commonly used is Addresses.  You may have a number of tables that each have...
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    Is trying to learn a new language every year worth it?

    While spending time recently looking for something new to learn that looked interesting, and it still being so close to new years, I was reminded of a bit of advice from the book "The Pragmatic Programmer," learn a new language every year. But is learning a new language every year...
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    Keep your dataTable clean with a custom popup

    The basic idea is to output some data to a user in a table and allow them to take an action on each row individually. A fairly straightforward solution is to create a separate page to link to, passing the necessary row information along. If the action is simple enough,...
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    Building Perl modules on OpenSolaris

    Anyone that's worked with Perl is probably familiar with CPAN.pm. CPAN.pm is the bundled module that handles downloading and installing modules from the CPAN repository. It usually works flawlessly but I've noticed that on OpenSolaris the process can be a bit more spotty. Let's try installing Mason as an...
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    Spring's refreshable beans

    A couple of days ago I found out about a really nice feature in Spring, called 'refreshable bean'. Spring's vision a refreshable bean is a dynamic-language-backed bean that monitors changes to its source code and then reloads itself when changes occur. And it is all this is done without restarting/re-deploying entire...
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    YUI3 Lets You Call Webservices With No Server Required

    I like YUI3, mostly because I can use it to fill in the gaps between HTML4 and HTML5, and also because a single line of code can make a button zoom around the page: var myAnim = new YAHOO.util.Anim( 'testButton', { width: { to: 400 } }, 1, ...
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    ColdFusion for Rapid Application Development

    I’m helping to write a tool to edit simple database information in a browser. ColdFusion is meant for rapid application development and is perfect for this or any small scale data project because it’s very easy to quickly make pages and is designed for use with a database. One of the...