The creators of Rational Dev write software programs every day and decided that writing down ideas as we came across them might save us some pain and time in the future. This is a collection of ideas from reading internet articles, books, commerical experience and attempted rational thinking. Hopefully you will join us and provide your own feedback on the ideas presented here.
You can retrieve the ? and & separated string pair parameters from the URL query string by using request.getParameter(String) in Java's HttpServletRequest.
Struts is a common MVC solution that has been proven in many Java projects. If you need to use Struts, here is an article that is pretty useful to get started on Struts. Included is an overview of what Struts is and how Struts works, Struts actions, form, common tags used in Struts, Tiles, and how to use JBuilder for Struts development.
This article gives an example of a Struts/Ajax solution for updating display data based on a select box without having to refresh the whole page. This is an alternative to writing Javascript straight on to the page that manipulates the DOM.
If you get the error
java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: org.objectweb.asm.ClassVisitor
this is an issue with asm jar versions. Hibernate and Spring use different versions that mess up your classpath. My solution was to remove Spring as I don't have time to figure this one out properly ;)
MyEclipse provides some useful documentation and tutorials here. These are a good introduction to the MyEclipse features and how to use them. Some of the tutorials even have videos to show you how to do it.
There is a plug-in for Netbeans that provides Facelets support at Netbean Facelets. The current version only works with Netbeans 5.5 and supports and older version of Facelets. MyEclipse has a more recent version in their Facelets support.
Hibernate does support usage of views in a similar manner to tables.
It seems that you can configure your hbm files for views much like a table as mentioned in this article.
For my current project I am using MyEclipse and the Hibernate reverse engineering tool. With my view, it is creating a composite key and creating an Id class with all my view columns in it. The main view object has nothing but a reference to and Id. The reasons for this are explained in this thread.
A query like "select id.compositeKeyName from viewName where id.otherCompositeKeyName = ?" is one way to get around this issue. It seems rather strange to me, but I don't have time to investigate further.
There is a bug in Firefox where right floated items can be overwritten by tables. See this bug report for further details.
If you are getting and "Access Denied" denied error message when you are trying to use the MOSS 2007 Sharepoint Designer, you could try making yourself the site collection administrator.