Tuesday, November 20, 2012

~ Responsive design: Continual Adoptive Systems ~

I build communities & web applications. Over the past year have been hearing the term Responsive Design as one of the key requirements from many clients. I had a brief idea about what it means after speaking with our Design Team - Yodaa.



I felt it was more of a web designer's discipline to tackle the responsive-ness of an application, until a couple of months ago. The statements holds good only if your content is going to remain invariable over time. When the application needs to present user generated content, then the onus is on the web application architecture to support such needs.

After the smartphone invasion into our lived in 2007, there has been disruption on all aspects of business & technology. Now that we have plethora of HighDefinition (Retina) displays on all form factors - mobile phones, tablets, laptops - we have a different beast to tackle.

I could real feel the difference when I got my MBP w/ Retina Display, not many web apps were meant for such screen resolutions. Even Chrome browser was weird without RD support.

Today I spent sometime reading - Responsive Web Design by A list apart. Yet another great piece of writing on design & technology principles. Bit upset with self, on having missed reading this 2010 article. I suggest you read the complete article.

After reading, I could relate to some of the observations which I have made over the last 2 months.
  1. HTML5 usage on Apple website to support HD devices
  2. Elon Musk tour of SpaceX meeting room
  3. The Web applications which we built to support responsiveness for different device displays
  4. Music in Motion
Following are some of the references found within the article
  1. Interactive Wall 
  2. Art Installation which are responsive 
Therefore, the responsiveness is more of how building an adaptive system which responds to the changing needs of an environment. Unlike the typical architectural world which is targeting immutability. 

Takes an paradigm-shift towards building not just web applications but buildings, devices, automobiles, interactive games, entertainment / infotainment, etc. In short, A.I.

Image Copyright: Design Industries

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Monday, November 19, 2012

Spring Security Tags in JSP and Sitemesh

If you are facing problem with the usage of any of the below tags 

<sec:authorize access="isAuthenticated()"></sec:authorize>
<sec:authorize url="/admin/users"></sec:authorize>

in your JSP despite including the security tag library or TLD


<%@ taglib prefix="sec" uri="http://www.springframework.org/security/tags" %>

There could be 2 possible reasons:

  1. The security tld which you are referencing could be old. Try and update to the TLD to the correct version of spring-security-web which you are referencing in your project. You can find the latest TLD here.
  2. After updating the tag library, if you still face any issue, then check the web.xml file for the order of filter definitions. The order of filter definitions: 
    1. Spring Container related 
    2. Spring Security 
    3. Sitemesh. 
    4. Thumb-rule being Spring Security Filter *ALWAYS* needs to be defined before Sitemesh

//Spring Security Mapping
<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name>
<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

//Sitemesh Mapping
<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>sitemeshFilter</filter-name>
<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

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