Facing new challenges everyday

After few days trying to run a rails application under apache with “help” of fastcgi module and without any success I’m finally giving up this idea, the reason is simple, I just can’t compile a c code used by fastcgi binding for ruby because of some missing header files and compiler support.

I tried to get the same application running on apache without fastcgi module but it is too sloooow.

The truth is, you can develop rails applications on windows, but please, don’t try to run this applications on apache with fastcgi support, you will waste you time.

To be honest, I don’t have the same problem when running Rails applications on top of JRuby since I can deploy these applications on any servlet container like Tomcat or Jetty.

I just started to use IBM RAD and IBM Websphere Portal few weeks back, IBM RAD is a very complete tool built on top of Eclipse, it has a lot of features that facilitates the work on portlet development, you can create in a few minutes a portlet using Struts or JSF as framework. Once a portlet is created you can build and package this portlet as WAR file to deploy on Websphere Portal.

Websphere Portal is completely updated portal solution, you can run JSR 168 and JSR 286 compliant portlets, you also have the option to create portlets using the IBM specific implementation that contains a lot of additional features.

The entire portal is fully customizable, you can change the portal appearance by adding new themes, all portlets can be added to a portal page by just drag and drop then on a page, access control can be easily done via deep integration with LDAP. You can even use google gadgets on your portal page!

Are you worried about scalability? Don’t worry, you can put several websphere portal instances running on a cluster mode.

ASP.NET is one of the key technologies behind .NET Framework, you can easily create web applications to collect data entered by user by placing some input controls in your page, once the data is entered and the page is submited, you can read data on server side by accessing specific properties in your controls.

This article will give an idea about how to create a simple ASP.NET project, it will have a page that contains some textboxes and a button, this button will have an event attached to it, we will add some code in this event to store user entered data into an SQLite database using its ADO.NET provider that can be downloaded here.

I’m assuming that you already have installed Visual Studio Web Developer Express 2008 in your computer, if not, you must download both from this site.

Now you must start Visual Studio Web Developer Express 2008 and then go to File->New Web Site… menu like we have in the image below:

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There are some situations where we need know the browser name to perform some changes on page code, the java code below defines a EL function to help on retrieve the browser name.

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