Best Practices in Web Form Design
I'm humming and hahing over some form designs at the moment. These days you have so many options, especially when you are getting smart with ajax and scriptaculous tricks.
Having options is always a double-edged sword. Yes, they allow you to do amazing things. But they provide a great recipe for procrastination.
.. just the situation where some thoughtful, concise guidance on leading practices from someone who knows their stuff can be a goldmine.
Thankfully I stumbled upon this great presentation on web form design by Luke Wroblewksi. It's a classic, and now I see he has a book out on the topic which instantly went on my "must read" list.
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SOA is dead! Was it ever alive?
There's nothing like a "financial correction" to make people wake up and start sniffing the crap that has been shoveled their way.
Waddya know? SOA is dead says Burton.
If I was paying for Burton services, I would be asking for a refund and an explanation as to why it took so long to identify the bleedin' obvious
The irony may have been a bit thick for anyone to realise that my story of Eric the Architect was little more than a lampoon on the generations of IT attempting to find a home within business (true friend - true story - honest!!!).
Guys - pragmatism rules. SOA never had anything to do with the bottom-line. Directly. And the indirect contributions lacked evidence and credibility.
In an excess of pragmatism, Miko Matsumura shut down the SOA center blog on the back of the Burton article. The new blog will be called the Whatever Center. Love the name, but will the dns changes ever propagate? I hope so, for Matsumura-san's integrity. Unlike WFTs transition to WTH, this is not a joke.
Personally, I'm with Justin Kestelyn:
The problems remain with us, whatever we choose to call the solution.
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l'amour de l'ail
As I found in Leon: Ingredients and Recipes garlic: you either like it, or you're completely nuts about it. Well I must be nuts. Whether it is sweet delicious nuggets in the best Bak Kuh Teh, or sliced in your favourite Thai stir fry, garlic claims its' place as one of the four essential pillars of great cuisine (along with salt, pepper and chili). One of my most memorable dining experiences was at the Stinking Rose in San Francisco (they have a great cookery book available). |
But as usual, simple is best. I don't think there is anything better than fresh bread toasted with virgin olive oil, and rubbed with fresh garlic before immediate consumption. Warm, crisp on the outside, soft on the inside with the sharp pungency of fresh, raw garlic.Mmmmmmmm....
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Tripping up on base64 encoding with webcache
Looking at an Oracle Portal installation recently, I wanted to call the WebCache invalidation API from SQL.
$ORACLE_HOME/webcache/examples/invalidation.sql sounds like a good idea, until:
begin
invalidate('hostname.com',9451,'password1','http://hostname.com/page')
end;
Error report:
ORA-06502: PL/SQL: numeric or value error
ORA-06512: at "SCOTT.BASE64_ENCODE", line 51
ORA-06512: at "SCOTT.BASE64_ENCODE", line 57
ORA-06512: at "SCOTT.INVALIDATE", line 38
ORA-06512: at line 2
Uh-oh. The base64_encode function included in the script is having trouble with the password. A quick look at the code...
create or replace function base64_encode
(
p_value in varchar2
)
return varchar2 is
BASE64_KEY constant varchar2(64) :=
'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789+/';
l_buffer varchar2(32767);
l_len integer := trunc(length(p_value) / 3);
...
begin
for i in 0..l_len loop
l_buffer := l_buffer || encode_chunk(substr(p_value, i * 3 + 1, 3));
end loop;
return l_buffer;
end base64_encode;
Note l_len division by 3, then using it in the for loop. Yep, classic 0/1 base offset issue. Any password with a length of 3, 6, 9 etc characters breaks the code. Fixed with a -1:
for i in 0..l_len - 1 loop
l_buffer := l_buffer || encode_chunk(substr(p_value, i * 3 + 1, 3));
end loop;
But that raises more questions. What is this base64 encoding function doing here anyway?
At some point in time it might have been required, but Oracle Database has had the standard function utl_encode.base64_encode for at least a few versions. It encodes RAW so there's a bit of friggin around with types:
select utl_raw.cast_to_varchar2( utl_encode.base64_encode( utl_raw.cast_to_raw('password1') ) ) as B64 from dual;
B64
-------------
cGFzc3dvcmQx
I did note the comment in invalidation.sql to the effect that:
-- this old example is replaced by 2 files, collectively known as the
-- PL/SQL invalidation API.
--
-- the 2 files are
--
-- wxvutil.sql which does similar things as what invalidate.sql did
-- wxvappl.sql which is a wrapper of wxvutil.sql
--
-- both files are located in the same directory.
Well, these files are not in the same directory (they are actually in ../toolkit), and what's the excuse for shipping broken examples anyway, even if they are old and obsolete?
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