I was recently in need of a stock quote web service in order to display quote information and charts for a corporate website I was working on, so I started looking around for something, free of course. I kept reading that the most common example of web as a service is the stock quote example, but I didn’t really find any examples that gave me a warm and fuzzy, everyone seemed to be scraping the html from a page. Doesn’t seem to be much out there, in the way of quote services for free, but I did come across a yahoo download service and a few half written examples, where you can fetch quote information from Yahoo in .csv format, with a 20 minute delay of course. I’ve also added a 1-day small chart and a 5-day large chart image by passing the symbol into Yahoo’s basic chart image url.
Ran into some issues on some of our Java sites today and needed a quick fix to protect the sites from malicious Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attempts. If you’re not aware of what XSS is and have websites that have sensitive user data, you may want to read up, you’re probably vulnerable, which means your users are vulnerable. I’m not claiming this is a perfect solution, but it was easy to implement and corrected the vulnerabilities with form and url injection. We basically have a Servlet Filter that’s going to intercept every request sent to the web application and then we use an HttpServletRequestWrapper to wrap and override the getParameter methods and clean any potential script injection.
I’m working on a photo gallery application running on Java 6 using Tomcat 6, JQuery for the client side, and images and xml generated from Picasa. I needed several sizes of images for thumbnails and animations and I wasn’t about to create multiple image sizes with Fireworks (I’m a lazy developer). Doing what every lazy developer does, I search Google for an image resize solution that would run on the application server and give me the sizes that I needed and take the manual work out of the equation. I found several PHP examples and disjointed Java examples, but no complete solutions. So, unfortunately I had to do some work to put something together.
I’ve recently been working with an SEO firm to improve our “keyword density”, structure and several other things on our public website. In their long list of recommendations was the task of producing nice pretty urls with relevant keywords, dashes instead of underscores, and so on, easily said, not so easily executed or so I thought. Our architecture in a nutshell is Apache web servers, fronting WebSphere application servers, running a Struts-based web application. Now if you know Struts, 9 times out of 10 your url’s are ugly, because a bunch of programmers didn’t care at all when they developed your application about the impact the urls would have on natural search and the framework developers pretty much left you with a bunch of “do.do”. Very quickly the SEO firm was recommending 70+ rewrite rules on the Apache server to resolve to the urls in the application and then custom work for each individual url to rewrite it to the friendly url, so that when Googlebot crawls the site it would traverse these friendly urls. I cringed at the thought of this suggestion, not only is this not maintainable, but when I run a local server I can’t use the rewritten urls, as my development environment doesn’t have a full blown http server with rewrite capabilities. I knew there had to be a better solution, I just wasn’t sure what it was.
