Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with jsp

How do I move from PHP to JSP/Spring without a J2EE background?

secret.osha — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:05:49 -0800

Anyone have experience moving from PHP to Spring/JSP? What approach made the change easiest for you? I'm comfortable in PHP. I know Java from a college classroom setting, but I've never had to help develop a J2EE app. I've looked at Spring tutorials (done the MVC step by step one), but the toy examples that they give just don't do it for me, probably because it seems like a lot of extra work for something I can write in PHP in a fraction of the time. I don't have a current project to work on, I just don't want to be caught with my pants down when the time comes when I'm required to use Spring and JSP. Anyone learn from sample Spring apps that aren't toys but also not ridiculously complex? Any other suggestions for the transition?

Thanks!

How do I pass a PHP session authenticated in IIS across to Jetty or Tomcat?

tra — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:37:34 -0800

I have users logging into XOOPS running on IIS, and have an instance of the Jetty JSP webserver configured to serve up Eclipse's Infocenter system. How can I set up security so that no users can view the Jetty-served content without being authenticated first in a XOOPS session off of IIS? I'm trying to tie certain web-based applications together here and I'm wondering if there's an easy way to achieve something.

At my company, we run IIS, PHP and MySQL which all serves up a XOOPS-driven website. One of our teams has provided the Eclipse Help system ("Infocenter") containing a stack of product documentation, all packaged up with the Jetty webserver. The way we received it from another team in our company, you run a batch file which installs Jetty as a Windows service, and when you run that service Jetty fires up and starts listening on a port that you can pre-choose in a properties file prior to creating the service. Going to your URL/port in a browser will connect to Jetty, which in turn serves up the Eclipse Infocenter content.

That's all well and good if you're happy to just send your browser to the Jetty/Infocenter URL but there's another dimension to this. I need to be able to secure access to the Jetty port so that only users who have pre-authenticated to XOOPS, hosted in IIS, will be allowed into the Infocenter/Jetty instance. And therein lies the rub: once authenticated to XOOPS the user has a golden key in the form of an authenticated session, but as soon as the browser is passed to Jetty, how can we set it up so that the user is forbidden from accessing any Jetty-served pages without the XOOPS golden key?

It's a convoluted situation here but let's just say that another non-IT team came up with this Infocenter idea - someone who "did this at his previous job" has suggested the idea, plenty of non-IT but senior-management people bought into it, he wrapped up everything in Jetty and gave it to us, and now he's on his way out of the company (probably so he can eventually leave a poo in the middle of some other company's carpet the size of the Pyramid of Giza for someone else to clean up) and doesn't have the time to work with us to fulfil the mess of other requirements we now have in taking this technology to the next level.

We have Tomcat serving other JSP content as well, which is doubly annoying in the scheme of things since, of course, it should be able to replace Jetty as the JSP serving system. Right now we're taking on a problem another team has created, and investigating how to make a WAR-file version of the Infocenter to be hosted under Tomcat, but our deadline for getting all of this resolved and implemented is the end of this month (9/2008). So, either in Jetty or in Tomcat, is there a way of securing these technologies so that only a user that has a valid PHP session generated within XOOPS and IIS is able to be passed thru to either a Tomcat or Jetty server containing the Eclipse Infocenter system? Our other Tomcat-hosted solution is our own code, provided to us by someone who's no longer with our company, so we can get our fingers dirty with that to an extent (and that's not something I'm asking to be solved here), but we think the solution to this Infocenter dilemma lies in some sort of custom thing we need to write which allows Jetty or Tomcat to act as a doorman, checking some sort of passed credential and disallowing browser access to content if that credential is not somehow "present" as the browser comes across. Like the concept of a referrer, but not as easily spoofable/hackable. Make sense? (frustratedly sips coffee)

None of those in my team are majorly experienced web programmers so we're running madly around the Internet trying to find solutions. Figured the hive mind could help. (crosses fingers and sips more coffee)

Oh, and to answer what might be everyone's next question - we aren't using Apache to serve XOOPS because IIS was on the machine we originally put it on and we felt there was no reason to since XOOPS runs perfectly fine under IIS.

Quoth the server, 404.

utsutsu — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 07:37:22 -0800

Apache and Tomcat strangeness... a page in my app throws a 404... but only when using SSL on a single server. I am having a very strange problem with one of my applications.

The skinny:

- The app is a Java JSP servlet web app running on a proprietary framework and tag library. It's something like a primitive and wonky version of Struts.

- The problem is that going to a certain page in the app gets a 404 but... ONLY on the test server and ONLY when SSL is used.

- It works fine on my machine locally, on another windows machine running tomcat, on our staging server which is solaris (just like the test box), and on the test box if I go to the HTTP address instead of HTTPS.

- Tomcat's catalina log give nothing strange.

- Apache's error log gives entries like the following:

[Thu Jul 31 10:37:53 2008] [error] [client 10.140.225.162] File does not exist: /usr/local/jakarta-tomcat-4.1.30/webapps/myapp/services, referer: https://mytestserver.ca/myapp/services/services.jsp?selServices=MyServices_f2

response when trying from Firefox:

Not Found

The requested URL /sao/services/changeRequestType was not found on this server.

Apache/2.0.49 (Unix) mod_jk/1.2.5 mod_ssl/2.0.49 OpenSSL/0.9.7d PHP/5.0.4 Server at mytestserver.ca Port 443

It looks to me like it is trying to find a /myapp/services/ folder? This folder of course does not exist. That URL ( /services/*) is mapped in my web.xml and has worked fine until now.

I do not have direct access to the servers in question, as I am only the developer. My knowledge of apache and tomcat configuration is very limited.

To my mind, the key question is why does it work on port 80, but not 443? Surely this must be a server config issue?

Any assistance is greatly appreciated and will save me from wasting more time spinning my wheels on this. I have googled to the best of my fu and have turned up nothing.

Can Javascript recognize a CSS width?

captaindistracto — Thu, 10 May 2007 12:51:06 -0800

CSS/JSP/Javascript Filter: I'm creating a widget which parses RSS via JSP and Javascript. This widget will allow users to include an RSS feed in their sidebar, but I'd like the widget to appear differently depending on the sidebar size. Is this possible to create an if statement determinant on the sidebar css class/id without know the class/id names? I have my widget width set to 100%, so it will inherit the width of the class in which it's placed. However, if a user has a sidebar smaller than a certain width, I'd like to show an alternate view. The widget shows an image floating on the left, then headline and short description of a story to the right of the image. If the width of the sidebar is smaller than my min-width, I'd like the headline and description to move under the photo rather than to the right. Can I create an if statement which will recognize the inherited width without knowing the class/id name? Is this possible?

The feed is parsed via JSP and is displayed via a Javascript include.

Thanks for any ideas.

PHP/MySQL to IBM WebSphere?

bofe — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 07:06:07 -0800

I'm a fairly recent college grad that never really worked with an IBM iSeries computer. Now I'm being asked to maintain an existing project at my job which resides on our iSeries machine. Where should I look for advice? I've scoured IBM's resources, and none of them make very much sense at all. I just want to get this project off of my plate. A little background... I've been doing web development for the past 5 years... but it's all been ColdFusion/XHTML/CSS/PHP/MySQL/SQL Server.

I went into the existing files (.jsp) and edited a lot of them and used some nominal JSP code (jsp:include, jsp:forward) --- but I have absolutely no idea how to test my changes. I've installed a ton of software from IBM (several gigs worth) and I still have no idea where/how to test this app.

All of the documentation I've read doesn't make any sense... or if it does make sense it is completely unrelated to testing this application.

Please help! Thanks!

How can I randomly display blocks of text in a .jsp file?

Kickstart70 — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 13:44:56 -0800

How do I output random blocks of text in a JSP include? I am not in any way a java/jsp programmer. I have an application that uses JSP includes to display advertising (Google AdSense) to visitors. Currently, the ads are fairly static in size and content...I'd like to mix it up a little, have different sizes displayed, and occasionally have no ads at all.

Is there a way to do this just inside the .jsp file? Ideally I'd like to be able to specify what percentage of displays each will get (roughly...doesn't need to be perfect), like one ad block showing up 10% of the time and another 90%. That's not a requirement for this though.

Thanks!

Precompiling JSPs in Eclipse

andrew cooke — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 15:20:59 -0800

How do I precompile JSP pages in Eclipse? I have tried Googling and search the Eclipse help. I don't want to precompile in the server, but rather in the IDE. And I tried just adding them to the build path, but nothing happened.
(I want to skip the load/request part of testing to hit errors earlier)

JSP Templates

andrew cooke — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 02:24:01 -0800

JSP templates as templates - am I reinventing the wheel? I'm using Spring's MVC with JSP views. Every JSP page has similar structure - headers, content, footers, perhaps a sidebar, etc. Looking around for "best practices" people seem to "include" footers and headers, but that means that every JSP page includes these "include" statements, giving a fixed format. To my eye a better solution would involve nested views, where a base template is extended with information appropriate to the page in question. One advantage of this approach is that you can have default values assumed in the base template without repeating them elsewhere. Another advantage is that you can further separate structure and content ("header" and "footer" being structural, and so belonging in the base template) in pages which contain a lot of text (think of help pages - you could put all that in the database, but why bother, especially since with Spring you can resolve to different views via the locale?).

There doesn't seem to be any support for this at the MVC level in Spring, but it could be implemented in JSP using custom tags and, indeed, there's a rather clunky attempt here (that might explain what I want better than this question, although I think you could make it less intrusive).

Anyway, my question is - does this already exist as a (popular/standard) tag library? I'm happy writing custom tags, but my impression of this stuff (generating web sites) is that there's a huge range of solutions already out there, with most work going into choosing the correct tools (eg Spring). Thanks.

What is the best web host to (cheaply) serve JSP/MySQL?

moift — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 01:35:18 -0800

What is the best web host to (cheaply) serve JSP/MySQL? I have a basic account with Dreamhost, and they've been great so far but they don't offer JSP support except on dedicated servers. I'm rather partial to PHP anyway, but since I've enrolled in a Java web development class, the professor would like me to use Java (go figure).

I've been doing the Tomcat/Jakarta thing on my home computer so that engine would be the best, but I'm not sure how different the other engines are and would be willing to migrate if the difference in implementation isn't drastic.

The site will serve as a sandbox for my group members and I to develop our projects, so there will be virtually no bandwidth and disk space issues. HTTP servers are a violation of our cable company's TOS. My Google results are saturated with crap and I'm wondering if any of your hosts offer a particularly good deal.

TIA

Transforming XML with XSL

riffola — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 17:01:47 -0800

I need a new way of transforming XML with XSL. Till date I've used PHP's Sablotron, which I absolutely love and is simple to use, but my host keeps forgetting to enable and include it each time they recompile Apache, so I was wondering if someone here knows of a way to do the same with either Perl or JSP/Tomcat or even PHP as long as it is without Sablotron's xslt_create(). The PHP code I use is beautifully simple.



<?php

ob_start("ob_gzhandler");

   $tivonp = xslt_create();

   $result = xslt_process($tivonp, 'nowplaying.xml', 'nowplaying.xsl');

   echo $result;

   xslt_free($tivonp);

?>

I'm hoping there is a similar simple way to transform XML using XSL in other languages.

Code Coverage tools for JSP?

evilelf — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 10:30:58 -0800

Code Coverage tools for JSP? Anybody know of any good ones? Would like to be able to evaluate the JSP code directly and not the java generated by the JSP engine.

JSP variables question

Stynxno — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 06:35:59 -0800

I have a JSP Question. How can you pass form variables to another JSP page without using cookies or sessions? I'm doing my form validation on one JSP page and then I need to do the processing of the form in the other. I'm guessing I could set some type of variables like php's $_POST but I'm not sure what to do.