Preventing Cross Site Scripting (XSS) Attacks

I came across very nice & informative article by Greg Murray on his blog here.
He had explained the XSS attacks & how to prevent them very nicely. Really worth reading :)

-C-O-N-C-E-P-T- Series : Java

<CONCEPT>

Casting String to Boolean in Java:

We can achieve this using the Boolean class' static method:
Boolean.parseBoolean(String s) - returns a boolean value

Sample code:


String str = "true";
if( Boolean.parseBoolean(str) ){
    System.out.println("Value is true");
} else{
    System.out.println("Value is false");
}


Casting Boolean to String in Java:

We can achieve this using the String class' static method:
String.valueOf(boolean b) - returns the string representation of the boolean argument

Sample code:


boolean blnFlag = true;
String strVal = String.valueOf(blnFlag);

</CONCEPT>

-C-O-N-C-E-P-T- Series

Hello Friends,

It have been a very long time since I've posted my last blog. I have came up with a new idea of posting blogs on any kind of CONCEPT related to programming(any language), design patterns or any technical stuff. Please feel free to correct me at appropriate points.

Thanks.

Keep visiting... :)

Locked Struts2 bug on Apache JIRA

Struts2 has in-built functionality of ajax enabled date-time picker control. But it has got one bug, which I've locked on Apache JIRA [here]

Bug Details:

Struts Version: 2.0.11

Description:
Suppose, I am currently on date Jan, 2008. When I click on the the dates 30, 31 on the topmost left corner, it takes the date as 1/3/2008 & 2/3/2008 [dd-mm-yyyy].
Same thing happens when I go to the month of Dec & click on the Jan dates. This problem is there while changing the year. I was dealing with the default view of the control.

Hope it gets fixed in the future releases of Struts2.

Using JConsole to monitor and manage JVMs

In-built monitoring and management support:
The J2SE 5.0 release provides built-in comprehensive monitoring and management support. It not only defines the management interfaces for the Java virtual machine, but also provides out-of-the-box remote monitoring and management on the Java platform and of applications that are running on it.
Also the JDK 5.0 includes the Java Monitoring and Management Console (JConsole) tool. It uses the extensive instrumentation of the Java virtual machine to provide information on performance and resource consumption of applications running on the Java platform using Java Management Extension (JMX) technology.

What is JConsole?
It's a JMX-compliant graphical tool for monitoring a Java virtual machine. It can monitor both local and remote JVMs.

I tried monitoring both local & remote JVMs. Really it's a very useful tool that helps user know the memory used by their application & many other important things. It is useful for both, a developer & a tester.

I've started exploring more on this tool as it'll be very much helpful in our Projects which will make them more efficient. I'll regularly post my experiences regarding my future explorations. Keep visiting :)

BarCamp4 Pune

The event BarCamp4 is going to held on 16th February 2008 in Pune. Venue will be at ThoughtWorks Pune.
Please register yourself here.

Setting up connection pooling for Oracle database on Tomcat 5.0.x

I was trying to set the connection pooling on Tomcat 5.0.x using normal way, but it was giving the error while connecting to the oracle database. One of my coleague suggested the following way, & it worked.

Added following entry to the server.xml present in the conf directory:

My article

My article on "AJAX: Redefining Web Applications" was published on javajazzup.com
It is present here.
Please give it a view and let me know your comments.

Saturday Project...

I just came across the article written by Geertjan Wielenga (here) & it was worth reading it. Maybe I'll start to implement some sort of a pet project in Java which I'll open source it later. I am really very passionate for contributing to Open Source :)

Implementing Fluent Interface in Java

Yesterday my friend Neeraj came across the concept (?) called "Fluent Interface". He told that he successfully implemented it in Java. Today I read lot of articles on it, and finally I was too successful to implement it in Java using a very-very simple program.

About Fluent Interface:
Fluent Interface is used to create a readable model i.e. to convert APIs to English-like sentences. It is slightly harder to write but much easier to read.

"Martin Fowler coined the term "FluentInterface" to describe objects that expose an interface that flows, and is designed to be readable and concise. The cost of this fluency is additional effort required to design the interface for your object and the slight increase in complexity. These types of interfaces are often utilized to create configurations for your objects but can progress into an internal Domain Specific Language or DSL." [Excerpt from Randy Patterson's blog post ]

Some useful pointers:
http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/FluentInterface.html
http://www.bofh.org.uk/articles/2005/12/21/fluent-interfaces

Nobel prize for men who made iPod possible

"Two scientists whose work made possible the development of the iPod and powerful laptop computers were rewarded with the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Albert Fert, a Frenchman, and Peter Grünberg, a German, have been jointly honoured for creating the technology used to read data on hard disks."

From the article on Timesonline: here

Google Singleton Detector

The Google Singleton Detector, or GSD, is a tool which analyzes Java bytecode and detects the use of four different types of global state, including singletons, hingletons, mingletons and fingletons. Then it outputs a graph with all these different types of static state highlighted, and shows all the classes that are directly dependent on them. The point of this tool is to allow you to see all of the uses of global state inside a project, as well as how they are all interrelated.

Worth to give a look here.

Do Frameworks and APIs Limit Developers' Imagination?

"Readily available frameworks and APIs can make developers very productive. However, they can also limit developers' imagination".

Summary from the article on Artima Developer => here

Connection pooling in JBoss AS

A very good & step by step article to do connection pooling in JBoss AS for various types of datasources. It is available here.

I configured for the Oracle datasource. After you've successfully done the configuration, then the following message will be displayed on the JBoss console:

12:30:24,217 INFO [ConnectionFactoryBindingService] Bound ConnectionManager 'jboss.jca:service=DataSourceBinding,name=OracleDS' to JNDI name 'java:OracleDS'

My own Google pages

I've created my own web page using Google Pages. You just need to have a Google account for the same. It's quite interesting. I'll beautify the current page and will add some more pages from time to time, sharing my experiences 'n' views.

My first Google page is: http://atul.shinkar.googlepages.com

Thanks to Google :)