Ronald Schindler

Can anyone suggest what is the best way to being thinking about struts initially so you aren't lost within the framework?
I am beginning to work with struts. I understand the concepts of the action servlet along with the jsps and beans. My problem is that I am finding it very difficult to track down issues and make changes. For example, I have a page that doesn't render properly. It use to be that I could go in and look at the code figure out what needed to be done. Now, I have tag libs and unfamiliar objects that I'm searching through.
Is there an area in which I should expend energy in first in learning this framework such as the tag libs or another area.
Thanks for any input.

I'll take a crack at this. String objects initialize to null unless you specify what it points at such as:
String s = "mystring";
As for the NullPointer - the operation is trying to perform an operation on an object which in this case has been initalized to null.
Let me know if that doesn't help.

Into which directory are you trying to put the class file when compiling?

I was looking ahead at the JDBC assignments and its recommending running an open source db. Does anyone have any reason why one should use this db as opposed to some other. (i.e. does it really make any differnce in the assignments?) I have access to a couple of others on a machine I'm using and would rather not load something else on it.

Thanks.

I have a servlet that I am rendering in a browser. One of the strings can be rather lengthy. I am displaying all of this information in a table. However, the string in question stays on one line no matter the length. The string never wraps within the td cell. I found a nowrap attribute but nothing that states that the string must wrap at the end of the window.
Additionally I tried setting the width of the table in both a percentage a fixed pixel width and I did the same for the data cell.
Any ideas why it would not wrap this string?
Thanks for any ideas.

Thanks for the instance comment that helped.
Here's where I'm at now. I am successfully calling the AddVideoServlet and adding the video. I get a true on add and have a count increase when I add. So far so good.
The ListVideoServlet however knows nothing about what was added. If I check to see what was added by AddVideoServlet, I get back a big fat 0 for the number of videos, which was my concern. ListVideoServlet has no knowledge of where the videos were added. How should it know where to look for what has been added into memory? My thoughts are that these objects need to be aware of each other but I'm not sure how to make that happen when they don't talk to each other.

Hey Juliane,
without seeing code its a little hard to make a definite determination. But it sounds as if you have the variable being set with the first method each time it is called. You might want to try looking at the scope of the variable within the first method.

Marilyn,
That's exactly what I was thinking. But if the list is to persist in memory then it seems that it needs to have a reference kept to it at all times so that gc doesn't pick it up. When I leave a servlet and go to an html page, I would lose the reference and therefore the list. I was thinking about turning the html pages into servlets similar to the last assignment but wasn't sure if one, this was acceptable and two, if this would actually work. My assumption at this point is that the mystery file is supposed to maintain session somehow but I'm still thinking this through.
Any other commentary is welcome.
Thanks.

Hoping someone can provide some further direction. I have it pretty clear in my head how to do the general assignment (at least I think so) except for one part, how do we maintain the list of videos in memory. I could write them out to a file but that seems to go against what is being asked for and jdbc is yet to come.
Therefore I have to assume that the arrayList is held in memory somehow but one I leave the servlet page or write the video to the arrayList I lose the reference to it. I'm assuming this is where the mystery file comes in but I'm not sure.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.

Can anyone recommend where I might go to get a good overview of threads. I'm looking for something at a 10,000 foot view of when Threads are used. From what I've read I know that they allow "multiple processes within a single program." Well, right now that means little to me. I'm not sure how to tell when one should use threads in programming. If multiple processes are good within a single program, then it seems that at the enterprise level all programming would involve programming with Threads.
Any commentary or good recommended reading welcome.
Thanks in advance.

Not sure if this belongs here but I figured I'd ask anyway.
I was doing some studying and came across the statement that java.lang.reflect is essential to the JavaBeans concept and the Serialization API.
Can anyone provide a high level explanation of why this is?
Thanks.

This is an interesting topic. I can't speak for everyone but I can give the reasons that I have.
--Economy would be the first. Things have been tight and the time I'm afforded to visit or even work on the assignments has dramatically dropped.
--Others commentary - I also try to respond to some of the questions under the basic/intermediate areas periodically but find that many of the questions I would feel qualified to answer have already been answered. Kudos to the crowd who beats me to it.
--Search - Although I feel the search functionality has significantly decreased, I usually try going there first before asking a bunch of already answered questions. At times I've really had to study the responses, but it probably answers my questions 75% of the time or better.
Maybe what needs to happen is to figure out a way to keep people involved. Any ideas I'm sure would be welcome.
--I know that some other assignments are coming. Maybe we could leverage the other groups to assist. I realize that this action would require work but could we leverage folks from other areas such as J2ME, EJBs, etc.
Thoughts?

Solved. I can't believe how long I spent on this. I would have fired me by now. the answer is to use + var +. For some reason this just escaped me. Thanks for the replies.

Okay, so I'm trying to get back on the trail and for the life of me I cannot figure out how to set the value using a servlet variable within the out.println statement. I tried escaping the ", that didn't work. I've tried ". No luck there either. It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't finish this one up before my hard drive crashed a while back.
Can anyone provide any other hints.
Thanks and good to be back.

I need to rant.
It happened again yesterday. Lost my hard drive. The killer is that I had the next assignment ready for submission and the one after started.
I'll be joining back hopefully soon but I've fallen quite a bit behind at work as well now.