Bill Dornbush

When I received the book promo email, I tried googling REST. My quick reading of the citations was not very helpful. I got that it is "an architectural style of networked systems." One said "The Web is a REST system!"

So I put it to you, the experts: What is REST? Why should I care about it? What will I learn in your book that will somehow make me better or more capable at providing web based information, which is what I do.

I have a working way to transfer someone to https:

In my program login.jsp, I added a hyperlink "Go to Secure Login". This link is rendered only if the protocol is not secure. I detect this through a method in the backing bean:

public boolean getSecure() {
HttpServletRequest request = (HttpServletRequest)facesContext.getExternalContext().getRequest();
return request.isSecure();
}

The URL of the link is determined in another method in the backing bean:

public String getHttps() {
String httpsPort = Props.getProps().getStringProperty("httpsPort");
HttpServletRequest request = (HttpServletRequest)facesContext.getExternalContext().getRequest();
String newpath = "https://"
+ request.getServerName()
+ httpsPort
+ request.getContextPath()
+ "/index.jsp";
return newpath;
}

The method Props.getProps().getStringProperty("httpsPort") gets the port number with a leading : from my properties file. This allows me to migrate the application to a server where https: is configured to a different port.

index.jsp is the page (not jsf) that is coded in web.xml as the welcome page. It contains: <jsp:forward page="faces/login.jsp"></jsp:forward>

I don't understand why, but if I link to the login.jsp page with the https: protocol, I get an error message "Cannot find FacesContext."

I am developing an application where I want the users to have some protection from the Internet and snooping. I want to force all users to use https:// rather than just http:// so that encryption is used. When a user logs in, I would like to redirect them to an https:// session if needed. JSF seems to take a relative .jsp for the <to-view-id> value. I thought about just setting up a .jsp that would issue a jsp-forward, or an http refresh, but that would require me to hard code the full server url, whereas I would like the page to be relative to my server and only need to change the protocol, so that I can move the .ear file to my test server and production server without having to modify the code. How would I implement a redirection to https:// when the user logs in successfully?

I am developing my first JSF application. I found "JavaServer Faces in Action," by Kito Mann, to be a great help in getting started.

The application includes a directory listing for families and individuals, and supports multiple organizations. One feature is attribute tables by organization, so that a person can indicate their attributes chosen from a list supplied by the organization. Standard JSF seems to only support fixed contents of list boxes, but I need to be able to include the drop-down content driven by the organization that a person is part of. Can AJAX help me with this? Are there other approaches that would also work, or would be preferred?

I don't know much about Eclipse out of the box, but I have used WSAD some for developing applications. Yes, it targets WebSphere as the server. It adds a complete environment for doing so, including support for all aspects of J2EE, web, database, XML, and more. It includes a debugging server that allows you to "deploy" your application on your development machine for testing. I have found it to be a very productive environment that has a lot of features that make development and testing fast. It handles almost all web.xml type files for you so you can focus on code development and testing. There may be similar packages for other environments but I doubt that they add any features that are missing in WSAD, and I would not be surprised that WSAD has some features that are missing in other packages of plug-ins. It also extends to other IBM products such as Portal so you can use the same environment for all development.

I have used iText ( http://www.lowagie.com/iText/index.html ) to generate PDF documents from servlets and JSP pages, and it works fine.
Bill

Can anyone comment on how the Sun SCBCD certification compares to the IBM Certified Solution Developer?
Thanks,
Bill D

The IBM Agent Controller is described in the documentation as a tool that allows you to control a remote server so you can load a new ear file and test it remotely. I have tried several times to use it but have very inconsistent results. My server has Win 2000, WS 5.0, SQL 8.1. My client has Win XP, WSAD 5.0, SQL 7.2 (8.1 wouldn't install on XP). When I try to connect to the server to setup the server configuration, sometimes it responds and sometimes it does not. I once was able to connect and load a new ear file, but the server then would not start and I had to reinstall.
Does anyone have positive experience using Agent Controller with a remote server? Do you have any suggestions how to get consistent connections?
Thanks,
Bill D

This was a great answer, but I have a slightly different question, to which I hope there is also a great answer. I have some JSPs that share a JavaBean which has session context so that it can save some variables. I would also like to access the bean from a servlet. How would I do that?

"I'd love to in a later book cover some J2EE concepts, especially servlets and JavaServer Pages. What areas of J2EE do you think need to be covered?
Joe"
Joe, I have used Eclipse, and am now using IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer, which I have the use of during a project I am doing. It has some really nice features integrating a test server and doing most of the grunt work maintaining the XML files. I would like to know how to do similar things with Eclipse, which may be harder but should still be possible since WSAD is based on Eclipse.
My project uses JSP, Servlets, and Beans, so an application showing how to integrate these components and how to test the app would be what I am looking for.
Bill Dornbush