First up, full documentation for the DATE merge tag.

Usage
*|DATE:FORMAT|*
Format Options
See the PHP Documentation for all the character codes you can use in the FORMAT string. (Thanks for the tip, Chad!)
Examples
*|DATE:l F jS, Y|* = Monday January 15th, 2009
*|DATE:m/d/y|* = 01/05/09
*|DATE:D j M Y H:ia|* = Mon 15 Jan 2009 05:53pm

Please let me know in the comments if you discover anything is not as documented here (or figure out anything that I haven’t!)

Yesterday, I bit the bullet. Thankfully, there weren’t excessively many issues. The first thing I stumbled upon was that Internet Explorer doesn’t like the DOM element.getAttribute(’class’) method very much (it returns null regardless of whether your element actually has a class.) I was forced to use the less pleasing direct DOM alternative (i.e. element.className.) Similar logic applied to the ‘name’ attribute (element.setAttribute(’name’, ‘x’) throws an error; element.name = ‘x’ doesn’t.)

The second issue was significantly more irksome, only because it took quite a lot longer to figure out what the hell was going on. This is partly because of the way my script was structured, which only made it more annoying. When creating a form input element dynamically, I was consistently getting the error: ‘Could not get the type property.’ This was not good, as there seemed to be no way to create, say, a radio button without setting its type.

To clarify: I wanted to end up with some HTML that looked like <input type=”radio” name=”my_name” class=”my_class” id=”my_id” />. I was using Javascript that looked like this:

function createElt(parent_elt, elt_type, elt_id, elt_class) {
var new_elt = document.createElement(elt_type.toUpperCase());
if (elt_id) { new_elt.setAttribute(’id’, elt_id); }
if (elt_class) { new_elt.setAttribute(’class’, elt_class); }
parent_elt.appendChild(new_elt);
return new_elt;
}

function createFormElt(parent_elt, elt_type, elt_id, elt_class, elt_formtype, elt_name, elt_value, elt_onclick, elt_onfocus, elt_onblur) {
var new_elt = createElt(parent_elt, elt_type, elt_id, elt_class);
if (elt_name) { new_elt.name = elt_name; }
if (elt_formtype) { new_elt.setAttribute(’type’, elt_formtype); }
if (elt_value) { new_elt.setAttribute(’value’, elt_value); }
if (elt_onclick) { new_elt.onclick = elt_onclick; }
if (elt_onfocus) { new_elt.onfocus = elt_onfocus; }
if (elt_onblur) { new_elt.onblur = elt_onblur; }
return new_elt;
}

createFormElt(parent_elt, ‘input’, ‘my_id’, ‘my_class’, ‘radio’, ‘my_name, ‘my_value’, clickMethod, focusMethod, blurMethod);

The problem was that Internet Explorer wasn’t gettin’ down with the idea of setting the ‘type’ attribute *after* appending the element to its parent. Never mind that, in theory, I still had a perfectly valid reference to the element in question, nor that setting any other attribute worked just fine. In any case, the solution was just to set the type element before appending. In this case I decided not to use the createElt method for form elements, but I could just as easily have added a parameter for type to createElt.

The code that worked:

function createFormElt(parent_elt, elt_type, elt_id, elt_class, elt_formtype, elt_name, elt_value, elt_onclick, elt_onfocus, elt_onblur) {
var new_elt = document.createElement(elt_type);
if (elt_name) { new_elt.name = elt_name; }
if (elt_formtype) { new_elt.setAttribute(’type’, elt_formtype); }
if (elt_id) { new_elt.setAttribute(’id’, elt_id); }
if (elt_class) { new_elt.setAttribute(’class’, elt_class); }
if (elt_value) { new_elt.setAttribute(’value’, elt_value); }
if (elt_onclick) { new_elt.onclick = elt_onclick; }
if (elt_onfocus) { new_elt.onfocus = elt_onfocus; }
if (elt_onblur) { new_elt.onblur = elt_onblur; }
parent_elt.appendChild(new_elt);
return new_elt;
}

createFormElt(parent_elt, ‘input’, ‘my_id’, ‘my_class’, ‘radio’, ‘my_name, ‘my_value’, clickMethod, focusMethod, blurMethod);

Now I just have to get the CSS working…

For reference, here are the versions I installed:

• Java 1.5
• Eclipse 3.2
• Tomcat 5.5
• Ant 1.7
• WTP 1.5.2
• Subversion 1.3
• Subclipse 1.0.5
• MySQL 5
• Spring 2.0.1
• GreenUML 2.5.0

1. Install OS X developer tools

2. Run software update and install all updates (esp. Java—this will update from 1.4 to 1.5)

3. Install MySQL

• There’s a nice OS X package at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html#downloads
• If desired, install the startup item and preference pane that come along in the install package

4. Install Tomcat 5.x

• Download the Core Binary Distro .tar.gz from http://tomcat.apache.org/download-55.cgi
• Run the following (in Terminal):

> sudo su –
> mv /Users/{username}/Desktop/apache-tomcat-5.5.20.tar.gz /usr/local/
> cd /usr/local
> gnutar -xzvf apache-tomcat-5.5.20.tar.gz
> ln -s apache-tomcat-5.5.20 tomcat
> rm apache-tomcat-5.5.20.tar.gz
> chown -R {username}:{username} apache-tomcat-5.5.20

5. Install Ant 1.7

• Download from http://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi
• Run the following (in Terminal):

> mv /Users/{username}/Desktop/apache-ant-1.7.0-bin.tar.gz /usr/local/
> cd /usr/local
> gnutar -xzvf apache-ant-1.7.0-bin.tar.gz
> ln -s apache-ant-1.7.0 ant
> rm apache-ant-1.7.0-bin.tar.gz
> exit

6. Install Subversion 1.3

• Download nice OS X package from http://metissian.com/projects/macosx/subversion

7. Set JAVA_HOME / CATALINA_HOME / ANT_HOME / PATH

• Create /Users/{your_username}/.bash_profile if it doesn’t already exist
• Add the following to it (using vim, emacs, or your text editor of choice):

export JAVA_HOME=”/Library/Java/Home”
export CATALINA_HOME=”/usr/local/tomcat”
export ANT_HOME=”/usr/local/ant”
export PATH=”$PATH:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/subversion/bin: \
/usr/local/mysql/bin:$ANT_HOME/bin”

8. Create a MySQL database and a user for your project

> mysql -u root
mysql> CREATE DATABASE projectdb;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON projectdb.* TO \
‘projectuser’@’localhost’;
mysql> exit

9. Install Eclipse 3.2.1

• Download from http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/
• Copy to Applications folder

10. Install Spring IDE

• Follow instructions at http://springide.org/project/wiki/SpringideCallistoInstall

11. Install Eclipse Web Tools Project (WTP)

• As for Spring IDE, go to Help > Software Updates > Find and Install
• Select “Search for new features to install”
• Select Callisto Discovery Site, and Web Tools Platform Updates
• In the Search Results window, select WTP Updates > Web Tools Platform and WTP Patches
• Expand Callisto Discovery Site, and click “Select Required”
• Click Next, Accept (Next), Finish, (files download) Install All
• Restart Eclipse as prompted
• Open Eclipse > Preferences
• Go to Server > Installed Runtimes
• Click “Add”
• Find Apache > Apache Tomcat v5.5
• Enter /usr/local/tomcat as the Tomcat installation directory
• Click Finish, then OK.

12. Install Subclipse

• Download from http://subclipse.tigris.org
• As for Spring IDE, go to Help > Software Updates > Find and Install
• Select “Search for new features to install”
• Click “New Remote Site…”
• Name the site “Subclipse”; URL: http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.0.x
• Click OK
• Make sure Subclipse is selected; hit Finish
• In Search Results, expand Subclipse and select it
• Click Next, Accept (Next), Finish, (files download) Install All
• Restart Eclipse as prompted
• Open the SVN Repository perspective and define your repository

13. Install GreenUML

• Download from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=132685
• Unzip and copy everything in the green_x.x.x/plugins folder to /Applications/eclipse/plugins
• Restart Eclipse

14a. If you have an existing project, check it out from subversion.

14b. If you need to create a new Spring project, download spring-framework-2.0.1-with-dependencies.zip from http://www.springframework.org/download

Last week, I ran into a bug in a simple little ASP/VBScript application I wrote relatively recently. The application does basic routing—URLs take the form http://www.xyz.com/a/b/c, where ‘a/b/c’ means page ‘c’ which is a child of page ‘b’, itself a child of page ‘a’. For extensibility’s sake, there is no particular limit on the depth of the page (i.e., http://www.xyz.com/a/b/c/d/e/f/g would also be valid).

Since we’re an all-M$ shop, we use IIS with ISAPI ReWrite to rewrite our URLs. For this particular application, the URLs are rewritten to http://www.xyz.com/index.asp?a=&b=&c (ad nauseum).

My bug, which was noticed months after the application launched, boiled down to this: when a page was opened as the first page in a browser session—e.g. when someone clicked on a link to the page from an e-mail client, and their default browser was not already open—the application would load the page as if the query string parameters were inverted. So, if the page loaded were http://www.xyz.com/index.asp?a=&b=&c, the application would behave as though the query string were ‘a=&c=&b’. All other load methods resulted in the application behaving as expected (‘a=&b=&c’).

The problem with this was: by design, the application parses the query string left-to-right (i.e. for ‘a=&b=&c’, it checks to see if it can find page ‘a’; then checks for page ‘b’ in pages that are stored as children of page ‘a’, then checks for page ‘c’ in pages that are children of page ‘b’). If at any point the page isn’t found, the application stops, and returns the latest page as it’s best guess. This means that inverted query string parameters are quite a problem—’a=&c=&b’ will check for page ‘a’, find it, then try and look for page ‘c’ in the children of page ‘a’. This will fail, since page ‘c’ is marked only as a child of page ‘b’. Therefore, the application will return page ‘a’, instead of page ‘c’.

To begin getting to the bottom of things, I printed out the value of the current query string key inside the for each loop I was using to iterate. Sure enough, the first time the link was opened, in any browser, the printout read “a, c, b”. After hitting refresh, or loading the page in any way after browser initialization, the printout read “a, b, c”.

Obviously, I was at fault here for assuming that the internal representation of a query string maintained order. What I find odd about it is that the order on initial browser load would differ from the order on any other load.

Apparently, this is just one of the vaguaries of the VBScript Collection object (which is really more or less the same thing as a Scripting.Dictionary object). The fix was to change my method of iterating through the query string—instead of using:

for each item in querystring

I now use:

for i = 1 to querystring.count

All of this just serves to remind me: I really like a language to call a hash a hash. You know—if it is, in fact, a hash.