Lots of people tout the benefits of web applications over old fashioned fat clients or desktop applications. Yes, I agree that it solves the problem of rolling out software upgrades and requires little or no installation effort because the user just needs a web browser. People do tend to ignore the disadvantages of thin clients however. With the advent of software as a service it might be worth looking at those disadvantages before jumping on the bandwagon.
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Posts Tagged ‘web’
Dec
15
Ikea’s Thin Client Woes
Apr
10
Getting The Context Path (Without a HttpRequest)
Web programmers know that they shouldn’t go writing JSPs with the Context Path hard coded in them.
If you do the following:
<a href="/MyApp/path/to/controller/home.htm> Home </a>
You’ll notice that as soon as you decide to deploy your web application using a different name than “MyApp” then none of your links will work anymore.
To avoid this you need to get the context path from the HttpRequest object as follows:
<a href="<%=request.getContextPath() %>/path/to/controller/home.htm>
Home
</a>
or by using a JSTL tag:
<a href="<c:url value="/path/to/controller/home.htm"/>"> Home </a>
What happens when you are rendering HTML in your Java code and you don’t have access to a HttpRequest object for whatever reason?