Last week I went to the Javapolis conference in Antwerp, run by the BeJUG - Belgium's Java user group. There were a couple of thousand attendees, and we saw as many interesting Java technologies during the day as we drank Belgian beers in the evening.
For database-backed web applications, the Details Page is the fundamental web application navigation design pattern. A Details Page provides a mechanism for both presentation and selection, and may be the focus of a data-centric site's structure.
Recently we delivered a custom-built solution to electronically sign Adobe PDF documents with a hardware token. In short, the system receives PDF files and returns a signed copy. These PDF documents can then be authenticated by the Acrobat Reader, which informs the reader that the document is indeed from the author in question and that the document has not changed since signing it.
We moved to the latest Java 1.5, and if there is something we love about this new version, it is certainly the use of generics. However, XDoclet support for generics is non-existent. The XDoclet team, did release a new version that allows you to generate classes containing generics, but there is no generics support. So I fixed it.
Each year some web application and web site user-interface features have become de-facto standards, whilst other newer ideas become common enough for common solutions to start emerging. This means that it is increasingly possible to use design patterns to describe aspects of web application user-interface design.
Books like Homepage Usability cover web page elements such as a top-left site logo that links to the home page, or a simple search box on every page. Similarly, pattern collections such as the one at www.welie.com describe detailed user-interface element patterns for specific things you can put on a web page. More in flux, however, are the larger scale structural and navigational patterns that correspond to the standard use of wizards and dialogue boxes in traditional graphical user-interface applications: not things on the pages, but how the pages themselves relate to each other in the web site structure.
Geographic Informations Systems (GIS) are nothing new, but in the past involved expensive software only available to professionals solving serious problems. Maps on web pages are nothing new either, but the maps themselves are usually small bitmaps - low-resolution data that is miles from serious GIS data sets. O'Reilly's recent book Web Mapping Illustrated, however, is a fast introduction to open-source digital mapping for geeks that describes software and standards that may soon become mainstream and change maps on the web the same way that RSS changed news feeds on the web.
It goes without saying that a desktop software application has keyboard shortcuts. Notwithstanding some old evidence that it is faster to use the mouse, it is surprisingly frustrating to use an application with no accelerator keys. That is why it is odd how long it has taken web applications to start using keyboard shortcuts, which have been available in HTML since 1997.
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