A Quick History of Web Development The Servlet and JSP environment extends past the need for basic Java support. Any computer running JSP or Servlets needs to also have a container. A container is a piece of software responsible for loading, executing, and unloading the Servlets and JSP. The reasons for this are largely related to the history of server-side Web development. A quick overview of one of the earliest and most prominent server-side dynamic content solutions, CGI, and the differences between it and Servlets is very helpful in understanding why a JSP/Servlet container is required. The exact life cycle events that are managed by a container . CGI The Common Gateway Interface, or CGI, is commonly referred to as one of the first practical technologies for creating dynamic server-side content. With CGI a server passes a client's request to an external program. This program executes, creates some content, and sends a response to the client. When first developed, this functionality was a vast improvement over static content and greatly expanded the functionality available to a Web developer. Needless to say CGI quickly grew in popularity and became a standard method for creating dynamic Web pages. However, CGI is not…

Configuration of ASP.NET AJAX When you create the project of an AJAX-enabled ASP.NET Web site, everything looks like a classic ASP.NET application at first glance. After a second look, though, you can see that the configuration file contains some changes in the form of new sections and new runtime components. In particular, the runtime components-made-to-measure HTTP modules and HTTP handlers-play a key role in the implementation of ASP.NET AJAX. The web.config File In ASP.NET, the web.config file stores application settings that apply to the folder where it is located and to child subfolders. Each application can have a variety of web.config files to apply different settings at different folder levels. The web.config file is a text file written in accordance with a well-known XML schema. The standard schema file features a built-in number of sections and elements, but new sections can be added to configure custom services and components. As mentioned, ASP.NET AJAX Extensions 1.0 is just an extension to ASP.NET, and it can be easily seen as a new service that requires its own set of extensions to the configuration syntax. New Configuration Sections The ASP.NET configuration file has a root element named . A particular configuration file that…

The JBoss Seam framework provides a flexible and powerful platform for developing web applications based on J2EE. Seam integrates different technologies like AJAX, Java Server Faces (JSF), Java Persistence(JPA), Enterprise Java Beans (EJB3), Hibernate etc. It removes the need for any manual plumbing of these technologies required to build J2EE web applications. Further, with JSF emerging as a standard for the presentation layer in J2EE the developers can leverage this with the server side strength of EJB3 technology. Preference for annotations over xml decreases the development time and improves the team's productivity. They key advantages of seam include : Integrate JSF with EJB 3.0 Integrated AJAX Business process as a first class construct Declarative state management Bijection Workspace management and multi-window browsing Prefer annotations to XML Easy Integration testing In this article we look at integrating eWAY's e-commerce gateway with a seam application.However, the same methodology can be used with any e-commerce gateway working on a similar concept like eWAY. eWAY offers various modes of linking to their gateway. This article uses the Shared Payment Solution. The shared payment solution takes away the credit card validation and related security concerns from the merchant's site to eWAY itself. The merchant site…

Overview Most of the power of AJAX resides on the client and is strictly related to the browser’s and platform’s client-side functionality. Even though a large share of AJAX pages are built using a slightly different set of server controls, they couldn’t work without a powerful environment available on the client and written in JavaScript. Such a script code governs the execution of out-of-band calls and often kicks in and replaces regular postbacks with AJAX postbacks. No AJAX functionality would ever be possible without JavaScript and a standard (and rich) Document Object Model (DOM). The DOM, though, is not enough. The DOM represents the programming gateway to the page constituent elements, but it is not designed to provide programming facilities such as those you can find in a general-purpose library. Normally, the script tools you can leverage to consume objects and contents from the DOM are those provided by the JavaScript language. Not exactly a powerful toolkit. Enter the Microsoft AJAX Library. The Microsoft AJAX library is written in JavaScript, although with a strong sense of objectorientation. The JavaScript language does support objects and allow the creation of custom objects. It does not, however, support full object-orientedness since it has…