Web Development

JRun going into hibernation

Anyone who has used ColdFusion will have heard of JRun, the out-of-the-box Java server that ColdFusion runs on top of. For many years people wondered whether JRun was going to be continued as a separate product or ditched entirely, especially seeing competing products go through multiple major releases while it sat by the way-side. Well, it seems the final decision is somewhere in the middle.

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IE6 and the min-height CSS attribute

There's a really useful attribute in CSS called min-height that lets you set the minimum height an element should be displayed as; this is often used to make two boxes appear the same height even if one has less content than the other. Well, Firefox, Opera and Safari support it but Internet Explorer 6 and older don't. Luckily there's a really simple work-around for it, you simply add a defintion to your CSS that browsers other than IE will ignore and set the height to the same as the min-height, e.g.:
[source:css]

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Scriptaculous + JS optimizations can cause problems

With everyone raving about YSlow I used it to prune a new project I was doing. Well, after the results worked just great with Safari and Firefox I was thoroughly confused why it wasn't working correctly in IE. The problem was that my Script.aculo.us routines weren't working, and more specifically I was getting really weird errors when the page was loading, before any of the routines executed. Some of the errors were very vague, e.g. "'Class' is undefined", and "Effect.toggle is undefined".

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Tip: Passing a shopping cart to Paypal Website Payments Standard

Here's a little tip for anyone using Paypal's Website Payments Standard system for electronic payments on their shopping cart. Their API allows you to pass in a complete shopping cart using a series of form fields listing the items, quantities, etc, as you'd expect. There's one tiny little detail that isn't explicitly stated - the button that you use to submit to the API must not have a name attribute otherwise it will fail. Here's a fully working example to better explain:

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Details for iPhone web app development (UPDATED)

Some details have been made available by The University of Washington on how to develop web applications for iPhone - lots of basics in there, like keeping a good separation of HTML and CSS, but also some specifics on e.g. the screen width, some limitations in place, etc. Mandatory reading for anyone doing iPhone apps.

UPDATE: Apparently someone didn't like the info being posted publically, so someone posted a copy of the iPhone details elsewhere.

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