Tomorrow Comes Today

Well, who still thinks that googlemail is the only available ajax webmail client: you are wrong. Ok, I am using googlemail too and I like the client but sometimes I think I should cancel the account because of the intensive user tracking without any information of the current and future use of that information. And anyway - why use a free webmailer as an web developer.

So I just lokked up for ajax webmail clients (via google *g*) and there is quite a lot to find. Be curious of the next entries here, when I will report about some specific clients - the first would be RoundRub.

Not only Typo3 released its new version 4.0. While the ftp was transferring the files of the 4.0 version, I wrote the first working version of an automated typo3 deploy process. Usually we use eclipse with cvs for every project and deploy everything via ant. So why still working with BBedit or UltraEdit via ftp on the remote server within typo projects?

Now the automated task copies all files from my resource folder (typoscript, html, css, layout images), all content of the typo3conf folder (localconf, user extensions) to the remote host and finally clears the page cache. Because only changed files are copied the update is finished within less than ten seconds. Press F5 and see the result. Quite perfect.

Now I can use all the features of eclipse, there is always a proper backup and working in a team is much easier with cvs. So let’s see, what Typo3 4.0 brings with it …

Who doesn’t know the idea of a little icon in front of a hyperlink to show where it goes to? I thought by using an attribute dependenp syntax in my css it should be quite easy. And it is: Click here.

But though it is CSS2 and of course not every browser has implemented that syntax, what a miracle - it doesn’t work in IE. So my little hack goes direct into the trash bin because until IE will support all the CSS2 features the link target should be part of CSS at all.

Some more about XForms. Thanks to a presentation of Jörn Turner (Chiba) the capabilities of XForms are much more clear to me now. My suggestion of using the switch syntax for multi screen forms was right. But XForms is able to solve much more as I expected such as external validation functions through customized xpath functions or the use of XML-shemas to use customized data types. I have to admit that the integrety of W3C standards brings much more benefits as I thought it could do. Next step: a midi-complex prototype.

A while ago I got the requirement to internationalise an application for creating and organising offers. As I found out how complex the formatting of dates and numbers is, if you are dealing with different countries and languages, I was quite happy that there is something like Java Locale.

So I realized that it seems to be common to write out a price in Euro with a Euro-Sign within the European Union and with EUR instead outside Europe and the similar with US-Dollar. Furthermore the position of the currency sign, the separator character for fractions, the space (or no space) between sign and value and the number of fraction digits are quite different per country or language … I was a kind of fascinated about all that details. All for all that you can easily use the Locale in combination with Currency and CurrencyFormat.

Perfect - I thought till today. So how should we deal with a Japanese locale, which should format and display prices in Euro? Well, probably use the instance of CurrencyFormat with an ISO sign, which allows using an individual currency. Wrong! The Euro-price with the Japanese locale is rounded to full numbers without fraction digits - but with by showing EUR as currency. So there is no way around, as setting the currency, the minimum fraction digits and the maximum fraction digits of the CurrencyFormat instance manually by using the default values of the used currency.

Now it works fine. The price is shown in the right currency, the format of the price value depends on the currency and the position of the sign, the space and the separator character are dependent on the used locale.

… Took Some $$, Real Strong Love .. ah well actually the whole debut of Troy von Balthazar makes addicted. Thanks for the hint to J.