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.
There always comes that time, when you’re debugging a Java application, when you get to that compiled code inside that open source jar that you added to make your life easier. Whether there’s an actual bug or you’re just trying to understand some behavior or weirdness you’re getting from calling this third party API, sometimes it just helps to see the source. If you’re using Eclipse you’re in luck, things just got easier, well they’ve been easy for awhile, but if you weren’t aware of jad they just got easier. If you download and unzip the most recent version of JAD, Java’s fast decompiler, and add the appropriate Jadclipse plug-in for your version of Eclipse, set a little configuration and your workspace will decompile compiled code automagically. No more ugly class outlines, just raw source code. This is by far one of the essential tools a Java developer should have in their tool kit, just like Firebug for a Web developer. Here are some step by step instructions to get you going, of course I’m assuming you’re already using eclipse and have an existing workspace.
