Kees van Dieren's Blog

Renamed my company; we are hiring!

2007-12-20T21:07:00.000+01:00

Our company has been renamed from Masterlands to Squins. I got some negative feedback about the original name, and some positive reactions on the new one.

We also have some job openings. Please visit our jobs page for more information.

Joëlle

2007-04-10T22:44:00.000+02:00

We have a baby, Joëlle! Visit this page for some photo's (Dutch)

Tools for IT professionals

2007-02-03T13:48:00.000+01:00

Here a list of tools I frequently use, which help me to speed up things:
- Firefox with Web developer and console2
- Putty ssh client
- Filezilla (s) ftp client
- Winmerge for merging differences between files
- Ethereal for http header analysis and other kind of network problems
- Tcpview to resolve "port already in use" issues
- Process Explorer as replacement for Task manager
- PS Pad as light weight text editor
- JBoss Eclipse IDE for Java development
- Outlook with Lookout search plugin (works better than Google Desktop search)!
- Squirrel SQL as universal database client
- JEdit for editing files directly over sftp (instead of VI)

Started Masterlands IT Solutions

2006-11-13T20:29:00.000+01:00

I have founded Masterlands IT Solutions on October 1st.

We deliver Technical IT consultancy for large scaled IT Projects in complex environments.

Currently we're working for a large Logistics Service Provider, implementing large scaled backoffice applications based on JEE technology.

I'm very busy with my company, however will post some interesting news as well in coming weeks.

Attended EJB 3 Training

2006-09-20T11:31:00.000+02:00

Have attended an EJB 3 training, sponsored by Info Support. Bert Ertman is the trainer. It was really very good evening, was presented with enthusiasm and has much knowledge about this stuff. Looking forwards for the next evenings!

[CSS, Javascript] equalize element height

2006-09-06T23:01:00.000+02:00

For a customer website, I had a problem with a two column layout. I had a problem with the layout.

Problem:
Both columns have a variable height, depending on content loaded from a database.The height of these columns needs to be equal. There seems to be no pure css solution.

Solution:
Created a non-intrusive Javascript (Crossbrowser, very easy to use). Download example, and the scripts.
Based on css classes, the height of div elements can be equalized. Quite easy to use, no javascript required and a friendly license (LGPL).

Making websites successful

2006-07-24T22:11:00.000+02:00

Last time I have been working on improving existing websites, especially for the project Studieboeken Center. I moved this website from domain hboboeken.nl to studieboekencenter.nl about two months ago; it know already has a Google Pageranking 5; a result I'm proud of:).

This article tells about some (technical) things that can be done to make websites more successful.

The site

The site is a marketplace for studybooks. Users can register and sell / buy books. There is no fee, everything is free. I get some income from it using Google Adsense and affiliate programs from bookshops.

What is success?

Succes for websites is:

Making people visit a website

Making people stay and return the website

Getting money from your website (not yet discussed here)

Make people visit a website

The following things increase the number of visitors:

User-friendly urls

More semantic content

Add the site to link pages

User-friendly urls

On the site, studybooks can be looked up per category. In earlier times, urls to buy these books where like http://domain.com/studybooks/find.php?categoryId=350. This is changed to the format http://domain.com/studybooks/economics/. The new URL format has the following advantages:

The URL contains important keywords for the page. This is good for search engine ranking; link collection websites can create deep links to this page.

The links can remain active when another server side technology / framework is used

Urls are easy to remember, for people who do not manage bookmarks with something like this

To separate different terms in urls, use a '-' as separator; the '_' is not recognized as a separator by Google.

Some examples:

wrong: http://www.domain.com/article/content_management_systems

good: http://www.domain.com/article/content-management-systems

This urls can be implemented with URL rewriting technology. URL rewriting for the most popular server platforms:

Apache mod rewrite often used with PHP, Perl

ISAPI Rewrite, Rewrite Engine for IIS

For more information about URL rewriting visit the Wikipedia Rewrite engine page .

Add the site to link pages

If your site has good content, and really adds value for visitors, there are often communities / link collection sites for your target group. Find as much of these pages, and ask to get a link on these websites. Google can help you finding these websites. In Google, search for link:www.competitor.com and some links to the competitors website will come.

Making people stay and return to websites

To make people visit the website again, the following things help:

Correct error handling

Google sitemaps

Correct error handling

When errors occur on many websites the page stays blank, or the error is shown on the screen. This is vary bad for the trust in the website from the visitor. Limit losing visitors as much as possible. These things help:

Make sure you log errors

Sent the errors to yourself automatically by email or SMS. The earlier you know things go wrong, the faster you can do something on it.

Make a user friendly error page; do not show the error itself, as this can be useful for crackers to crack your website.

Use Google Sitemaps to find link errors.

Google Sitemaps

Google sitemaps tells webmasters how Google sees their site. Google sitemaps is a free service; you must be owner of the site, and have a Google Account. Creating / generating a Google sitemap is not necessary, event without it adds much value:

Crawl errors: errors in rewritten urls (illegal characters), Page not found errors, time outs etc.

robots.txt analysis, shows you errors in robots.txt

How your website performs in mobile browsers

Some more resources you may want to read:

Search engine optimization

Many good articles for people who make websites

Website usability

Status update

2006-06-07T01:47:00.000+02:00

The prototype is working, but not yet well documented. It hasn't been made with Hibernate annotations, but with 'classic' Hibernate (was Alpha when I started programming). JSF is not as powerful as I hoped; it does not create clean urls that are obligatory for search engines; a basic multi select drop down list / checkbox can not work straight on Java beans, lots of custom coding is necessary.

Currently busy working on the site Studieboeken Center, a Dutch study book shop.

Hope to publish the prototype soon.

JBoss on Road event

2006-05-01T20:40:00.000+02:00

Last Friday I attended a JBoss on Road event.

In the morning a JBoss Operations Network Workshop was given; this is a large set of tools to monitor JBoss AS in a network; quite interesting, I think for companies that use JBoss AS for production purpose this tool adds much value as a server management utility.

In the afternoon, a presentation about JBoss Seam was given. Before the presentation I didn't expect it to add value (why add another layer to a too much layered architecture)? However, JBoss Seam is a framework that integrates JSF and EJB 3 by removing the binding layer (replacing it with annotations). Absolutely worth looking at!

If there are enough people that like it, a Dutch JBoss User Group (eventually combined with Belgium) may be founded!

Contact JBoss if you like to help founding a User group.

The prototype is being built; I was too busy in doing other (less nice) things; my garden is currently "under construction", and while working on it, I found that the sewer was stuck and needed replacement. This will still take another month, unless than I've got less time to write.

Proof of concept J2EE

2006-03-29T02:27:00.000+02:00

This week I'm going to do a Proof of Concept with the following technologies:

Java server Faces: Standard for building User interfaces for Java web applications.

J2SE 5.0Newest Java Virtual Machine

HibernateFor persistence, hibernate with annotations will be used

The functionality built is the following: Create an web module to manage the roles, users and user-role associations. It will also integrate into Apache Tomcats' JDBC Realm (maybe a customized one).

For my job I've made custom tag libraries, which handle data binding to Beans. I'm curious if JSF can do things as nice as this taglib can :).

Existing JavaScript frameworks

2006-03-25T19:18:00.000+01:00

On the Internet, I haven't seen many usable JavaScript frameworks until now. There are very much usable sites (such as Quirksmode), that figure out browser differences for JavaScript, but mostly it's just a short script per problem;I haven't seen this structured in a framework.

For my customers I have written different JavaScript utility classes that help the programmer to focus on business logic. Some key features of these scripts:

Resolution detection

Flash detection (detect if Flash version x is available)

Event management: register multiple events for the event types onload, onresize, onmousemove

Simplifies integration of FCK editor in forms

Integration with Taconit (Ajax framework)

Get very much info about the screen (resolution, window size, document size)

All things are implemented straightforward; it implements technical features many JavaScript writers need.

I'm thinking about it, to publish this collection of scripts as open source on Sourceforge.

To make sure, I'm not going to re invite the wheel, I've done some research to some existing frameworks. I found the following:

Prototype

Mochikit

Do you think many people need another JavaScript framework?

Ajax usage

2006-03-20T20:54:00.000+01:00

Have you already used Ajax in customers projects?

I've used it for the back end from one of my customers' websites.

For this project I've used Taconite , a lightweight Ajax framework. Starting with Ajax is not too hard when using this framework. It handles the basic stuff: encapsulates browser differences, and handles the technical stuff. The browsers' DOM is used to traverse through the response XML and to insert it into the document. It provides insertion of dynamic content to the page: before / after a node, inside a node or by replacing a node.

For my back end, Ajax is used for flow control and form validation. It works fine, and will save me lots of time on my next projects.

I found some issues with Internet Explorers' DOM support:

For TEXTAREA nodes, new lines are ignored by default

For SELECT nodes, multiple attribute is skipped

I've made fixes for these bugs. I've given them back to the Taconite community; however, no release with these issues fixed, has been made yet (some issues aren't yet in CVS). Click here to get Taconite with these problems fixed.

Plenty of Ajax frameworks have been released already. Have you been using Ajax already? Should we keep it lightweight, or should it support more stuff such as XUL, like this one does?

Welcome to this blog

2006-03-18T12:36:00.000+01:00

This blog is to share my knowledge with the world, discuss newest developments about web development, and about tools that make life easier.

Introducing myself

I'm a software engineer at MP Objects. MP Objects creates software for Supply Chain Systems. Currently I work on large scaled J2EE projects with Open Source components, such as JBoss, Eclipse and XDoclet.

I'm owner of a small company which does some web development for small companies.

Contents of this blog

- Discuss newest (web) technologies
- Discuss what's wrong with current (web) technologies
- Discuss useful tools / utilities that improve productivity of computers users

Happy reading / commenting!