Innovate with Google Maps and Google Docs

Have you seen IT companies websites recently? They doesn't seems like they themselves are aware of the true potential of Web 2.0. Here are few tips and trick to use when (re)designing your company website. Company's Contact Us web page / Locate Us pages are simple static content with address. Hard to visualize and outdated, doesn't reflect company's diversity, even when the office addresses runs to the bottom of the page. You should, at that point, think back and check whether the website represents...

Grails - A RAD framework

During my quest to learn a new framework I stumbled upon Grails. I have heard about it very often but actually never dared to dive into it thinking that it might be yet another scripting framework like Ruby. But I was wrong and I must admit that I was mesmerized by what I saw (read it as "with What I achieved") in Grails. On the homepage of grails it says "the search is over", its a bold statement...

CSS: Using every declaration just once

While surfing for best practices on Internet, I found this article on Google code site. It was an interesting article which was mostly directed towards web developer, but since j2ee deveoper also do some sort of web deveopment, I thought it will be a good idea to share with you guys.Author: Jens Meiert, Google WebmasterRecommended experience: Working knowledge of CSSOriginal Site: http://code.google.com/speed/articles/optimizing-css.htmlA logical way to make your website faster is to make the client...

Unit Test Helper

Working on JUnit is fun and great but always remember a golden rule "Never change a good design just to make it accessable/runnable by JUnit". Let me elaborate on this statement to tell you what exactly I meant. In our code we write data access layer, which creates connections and execute sql.Specially in Web Application, connections are often managed inside container and are accessed by our code using JNDI. This is one of the industry best practices. Problem is how to test that code outside the...

Google Maps

Google Maps is an interesting feature which most of us have used in some way or other. Either to find the way to a friend's new house or to locate a Pizza joint near our house. It helps and it sure do but what is interesting is to learn how to use this in our Applications to make them more user centric with all other Web 2.0 concepts.Let me start with giving you some examples, you go to a Bank's website and click on Locate an ATM link. It takes you to a page where you select a state from a drop...

Custom Error Pages

Nope you are wrong, I am not talking about errorPage="true" attribute in this blog. I am talking about few error messages which are sent by the server to the browser like 404. How often you have seen this page.Now this is not a good way to treat your site visitors. The main problem with this kind of errors is that than the visitors can drift away from your site. So displaying a custom error message...

Add bubbles to YUI

YUI has been a great tool to create fast RUI web applications. Intermediates, who are already using it, are complaining about important missing pieces. And experts are comparing it with other such libraries like DOJO, Script.Aculo.Us etc.Few of the most important features which are missing in YUI are expandable/collapsible panel. Accordion Menu etc. There exists a library which spices up few things for YUI named bubbling library. It does not provide solutions to all YUI problems but it does provides...