Joshua van Aalst’s blog

As we race towards the 5th version of the www.joshandfriends.com.au website I have been dealing with several 3rd party vendors who appear to have a philosophy of blatantly ignoring customers feedback and requirements.

Let me start out by defining what www.joshandfriends.com.au 5th version is. The current live site is the 4th version and was originally designed as an extendible content management system (Events, Profiles e.t.c.) with 2 additional 3rd party software products: VBulletin forums and Photopost Gallery.

As the current version of the site has grown at a tremendous rate and the industry changes constantly around it, it is vital that a new version of the Josh and friends site be released.

The new version of the site will focus more on:

1) Social networking.
2) Delivery of an extensive range of easy to use software to the end user.
3) A complete face lift to ensure that the site looks appealing and that all the seperate software products are integrated seamlessly.

This will see a range of new third party applications including vBulletin 3.7 (with promised new Social Networking functionality) and Photopost Classifieds.

So why the blog entry?

Well, during the development on the new site I have been dealing with vBulletin and Photopost and I am amazed to find 2 companies with such little regard to the needs and wants of their customers/users. Please note that this is mainly targetted at Jelsoft (vBulletin) and far less at Photopost.

Why do I say the above?

Over the above 2 years we have seen the explosion of Social Networking, spearheaded by MySpace and Facebook. These sites allow users to link with friends, create groups of friends and have enhanced profiles. Many 3rd party application vendors have now released social networking products of their own.

Jelsoft is the producer of the most commonly used forums software vBulletin and in late 2005 Jelsoft seized the crown of “the king of forums” but has since done almost nothing to update their core product, instead choosing to work on seperate module products vBulletin Blog and vBulletin Project, which could only be considered amateur at best. They have done this at the expense of meeting consumers needs, and one only has to browse the vBulletin forums (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/index.php) or search Google for “vBulletin 3.7″ (The next version with promised new social networking features) to find 1000s of furious customers.

Not only has Jelsoft not released any major new features to their products for 2 years but they have also refused to release any official release date on their new product. This means that anyone planing future updates to their websites have no accurate information for which to base their plans on.

While Jelsoft are busy outraging their user base new competitors are really picking up steam. IBP already has full social networking in their forum product. It will only be a matter of time before more irrate Jelsoft users switch over.

In addition to the lack of new features the standard graphic templates of vBulletin look like they were designed in the 70s (ok that is an exageration) but they are outdated. Yet again numerous people have commented on this in the vBulletin forums and yet again nothing has been done or at least promised to be done.

It is time for Jelsoft to stop resting on their laurels and demonstrate why they are the market leaders in Forum software.

Lastly Photopost, as previously mentioned they are no where near as bad as Jelsoft and i would thoroughly recommend their products. That being said they also suffer in a similar manner to Jelsoft. Photopost primarily produce Gallery software. They have just released a new version of their Gallery software with their own custom forums built in. This has enraged many Photopost Gallery customers as their is serious flaws in their core product that need to be addressed. For example Ajax technology is not used to upload large files or zips of images. This means the end user is not presented with a progress bar of their uploads and uploads will often fail entirely. This technology is in the reach of Photopost and is already used on eBay, Flickr, Facebook and Myspace.

Focusing on improving their core product is more important that producing a 2nd rate Forum software. If people want forum software they will buy forum software. I hope Photopost listens to the requests of the people on their forums and does not fall into the same trap of Jelsoft.

In conclusion. I would still suggest buying Photopost as they have a great suite of products and have promised to introduce new features asap. Jelsoft have an excellent forum software vBulletin but it is quickly becoming outdated. I’d wait and see when version 3.7 of vBulletin is released with the promised new features prior to purchasing.

Approximately 2 weeks ago I added Google adsense banners to the top of my sites www.joshandfriends.com.au and www.gayscene.com.au . The aim? To raise some money for the increasing cost of web hosting due to site growth.

Adsense = When you put Google banners and adds on your site for other sites
Adwords = When you pay Google to advertise on their search or their adsense network of sites.

We are currently doing an average of 20,000 unique visitors per month on Josh and Friends alone.

Over the 2 weeks that the advertisements have been up we have generated a total of US $3.67 . I could say that is a joke but I think the number speaks for itself.

To make matters worse lets look at how much I was paying Google when i was using their advertising program adwords to advertise on other similar sites to mine.

I was paying between 39 cents and 75 cents a click (Australian). Average of 57 cents. At current exchange rate (84 Australian cents to 1 US dollar) that is 48 cents per click I pay Google.

So how much does Google give back when i put their banners up? I’ve had 62 clicks in the 2 weeks which averages out to 6 cents.

So Google’s markup per click is 42 cents a whopping 88%!!!!!

You can see why their the worlds most successful company right now.

I am currently looking for another advertising agency. One which doesn’t take 88% of revenue. Send me an email josh@joshandfriends.com.au if you know any or reply to this entry.

Over the past decade new end user computing technologies have progressively slowed. Their have been fewer and fewer increases in CPU Ghz and increases in RAM that only matched the increase in it’s requirements by modern software applications. The only major improvement in technology has been the move to multiple (’dual’, ‘quad’) core CPUs. Realistically though most of the average end user applications do not take advantage or require continuous multi processing.

In a move that has completely shocked the industry Dell has released it’s new 13inch laptop XPS M1330.

What makes it so special?

Solid State Hard Drive

The XPS M1330 is the first laptop to offer the new Solid State hard drive technology. Solid State is a hard drive where the storage is stored on flash memory rather than a mechanical device. Solid State hard drives are much much faster in every way than traditional hard drives. As the hard drive is the root cause of slowness in almost every application a performance benefit here will be seen in almost every part of computer useage… when starting the computer, starting applications and running multiple applications at the same time (the page file is faster to access). Not only the above but the drive is also more shock resistant than traditional mechanical drives. Their is a great article on the specifics improvements of the Solid State hard drive here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_state_disk

LED display

The XPS M1330 is also one of the first laptops to offer a LED display. Over the last decade every laptop has had a TFT display. What is the benefit of this new type of display? It’s thinner and brighter than the traditional TFT displays which means you need less power to get the same level of brightness.

Centrino Pro CPU

The XPS M1330 is also one of the first laptops to sport the new Centrino Pro CPU/chipset. This is the successor to the current Core 2 Duo. The Centrino Pro has a large cache, faster Front Side Bus and more instructions than it’s predecessor. In english? It’s faster.

More of everything

In addition to the above technology breakthroughs the XPS M1330 also sports 4gig of Ram and Wirless N networking.

So what’s the end product like?

With massive improvements in power saving and component size the Dell XPS M1330 weighs only 1.7kg and is the thinnest, lightest and fastest in it’s class. Far far faster than the Mac Book Pro or any other currently available laptop.

What is the community’s response to the new laptop?

For one of the first times in the history of a new product release the Dell XPS M1330 has received rave reviews from every review site on the net. Just search for “Dell xps m1330 reviews”. The only negative feedback I found was that their was a 2 month wait on the laptop due to the ridiculous amounts of back orders!!

Basically BUY THIS LAPTOP!!

Just a quick heads up….

If you are using the above combination and you get the error

“detached entity passed to persist”

This could mean that you are getting a new entity manager not the one in your transaction.

Make sure you do NOT call getEntityManager() but just use entityManager as an instance variable.

Java EE5 will inject the correct entity manager for you to use!

Hope that helps,
Josh

Hi everyone,

I recently upgraded from Netbeans 5.5 to Netbeans 5.5.1 and noticed that some of my Visual Web Pack pages were rendering with the javascript error ‘webui’ is undefined.

If this error occurs most UI components on the page will cease to function.

Basically some new javascript libraries were added to Netbeans 5.5.1 and all components require them but some pages were not generating the required javascript code.

So what is required to fix this?

Ensure the following lines are at the top of the Visual Web Pack page that is causing the ‘webui’ is undefined error:

]]>


Obviously change the domain above to your own.

If you would like a simpler way of doing the above that is dynamic and can be reused on any page with the issue then create a converter like so:

package com.jafp.web.jsf.converter;

import com.jafp.common.configuration.SystemConfiguration;

import org.apache.log4j.Logger;

/**
*
* @author Joshua van Aalst
*/
public class DojoJsConverter implements Converter
{

public String getAsString(
FacesContext context,
UIComponent component,
Object object)
throws ConverterException
{
try
{
Logger.getLogger(getClass()).debug(”Start DojoJsConverter”);
ResponseWriter writer = context.getResponseWriter();

writer.startElement(”script”, component);
writer.writeAttribute(”type”, “text/javascript”, “type”);

writer.writeText(”\ndojo.hostenv.setModulePrefix(\”webui.suntheme\”, \”"
+ SystemConfiguration.getSystemConfiguration().getApplicationPath()
+ “/theme/com/sun/webui/jsf/suntheme/javascript\”);\n”, “dojoscript”);
writer.writeText(”dojo.require(’webui.suntheme.*’);\n”, “dojoscript”);

writer.endElement(”script”);

Logger.getLogger(getClass()).debug(”End DojoJsConverter”);
return “”;
}
catch (Exception e)
{
throw new ConverterException(”Unable to generate a link for supplied object”, e);
}
}

public Object getAsObject(
FacesContext context,
UIComponent component,
String displayString)
throws ConverterException
{
return 3;
}

}

Now you can simply do this:

]]>


You can of course simplify this further by adding all .js includes to your converter. Then all you will have is 1 line:

]]>

Hi,

In light of my upcoming review of Netbeans 6 vs Eclipse 3.3 I thought I’d first see what else is out there.

There is an excellent article here:

http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/34009/1954?pf=true

A very good read.

Hi all,

Winston Prakash has posted a great blog about the www.joshandfriends.com.au, www.gayscene.com.au and the new www.stratacentral.com.au series of sites on his block here:

http://blogs.sun.com/winston/entry/realworld_webapp_using_vwp

I’d like answer two posts in regards to the site:

______________________________________

A. Varela - Can you please elaborate a bit on how Josh is using converters on his website?

A. Varela - Can you please elaborate a bit on how Josh is using converters on his website?

Their are a couple of issues here. The main one is that I want the URLS to be SEO friendly. Something like http://www.joshandfriends.com.au/Events/Create

The issue with using a standard VWP faces component is it won’t generate SEO URLs. I use converters to examine an object and create a SEO URL from it. On the inbound side the Servlet Filter interprets these URLs and forwards them to the correct VWP jsps.

For example if i were to pass an object instance of Class “au.com.jaf.News” to a converter called converter.LinkConverter.

The output would be something like /News/VWP_5_5_1 _released_2345

… where 2345 is the id of the instance.

This also occurs with my Images which are surrounded by a href.. tags

I also find Converters very useful for fine grained control of the output. All my images have alt and title attributes. All the links have title attributes.

I didn’t use custom tags as I don’t really like configuring a tld each time i change something.

You can also use converters for generating HTML tags that aren’t realised in the VWP or MyFaces component libraries. UL and OL tags are an issue here.

______________________________________

JJ - Does the site load in the Visual Designer or does it have to entirely be updated in the jsp view? If it doesn’t load in the designer I don’t see the point.

You raise an excellent point. The answer depends on the following:

1) If you are using a static skin (via CSS) then the sites layout will show correctly.

1b) If you are NOT using a static skin i.e. the user can choose skins for the site (like in the case of my site). Then it will never display correctly in VWP designer view. — That being said you can still use the designer! Use the Outline Window to reach you components and the properties window to edit the components.

2) Dynamic images will never load so the Designer view will look kind of weird even if it does display.

So the question is why use the designer at all when it only correctly renders primarily static sites with dynamic text?

For many reasons:

1) The designer is very useful for prototyping up the page before you add dynamic content. I do use it for prototyping up pages which use relative positing i.e. a Dream Weaver generated html templates.

2) I often use the designer to configure properties/values of components rather than the docos. It is very easy to use (and see what’s available) via the VWP properties window and the Outline VWP window.

3) The designer does a great job of some useful code generation. A prime example is the actions for paging on outputTables. Without the designer I’d have to have done it myself.

4) For quicklky testing action event combinations. I often use simple designer pages to test combinations of auto-submit on changes and complex components. You can knock up a test on your code base asap.

Hope the responses were useful.

Thanks,
Josh

p.s. I’ll ask my web designer to post up some locations to download predefined stock HTML templates.

Good morning from Sydney AEST and welcome to my blog. Up to now i’ve been avoiding the inevitable of creating one. I’ve always felt that a diary so to speak was rather pointless but their is a whole host of ’stuff’ that i’d like to talk to people about, from my new website www.joshandfriends.com.au right through to every day happenings and my recent dealing with the shocking customer service at major corporations. Thats it for now enjoy.