Website scraping with a Google Spreadsheet
In a recent project, a client was doing some market research. They had a (long!) list of website URLs, and needed to get all email addresses displayed anywhere on the page of each of the sites. I...
View ArticleAdding Facebook Login to Google Docs Forms – Part 1
Google Forms are a great, capable tool. They are quick to create, and are used for a number of purposes such as surveys and polls. They are limited, however, in how much customization can be done....
View ArticleAdding Facebook Login to Google Docs Forms – Part 2
In my last article, I gave an outline of how we can enhance a Google form with a Facebook login. The steps were as follows: Create a Google form as usual Create a plain, empty html file on a web…...
View ArticleAdding Facebook Login to Google Docs Forms – Part 3
Next up is actually adding the Facebook Login widget to the page. The code for this is fairly lengthy, so I’ll highlight the steps and basic strategy (if you just want to try it out, check out...
View ArticleAdding Facebook Login to Google Docs Forms – Part 4
The final step in the process is to use the Facebook Javascript API to make calls to retrieve some information from the user’s public profile. Their API is documented here so I’ll just give a small...
View ArticleA robust JavaScript regular expression for email addresses
When developing a full-scale web application, generally input validation is done with a combination of client-side and server-side code, maybe using a validation framework. For example, mailcheck.js...
View ArticleBuilding a Java EE Web app from scratch – Part 0 – Introduction
Last fall I changed jobs, moving from project management back to full time software development. It’s actually quite refreshing moving from project timelines, budgets and HR duties back to a pure...
View ArticleBuilding a Java EE Web app from scratch – Part 1 – Building the virtual machine
We’ll kick things off by starting to build up the development environment in a virtual machine. The steps we’ll be doing: Downloading and installing Oracle Virtual Box Downloading and installing Ubuntu...
View ArticleBuilding a Java EE Web app from scratch – Part 2 – A (really) simple servlet
In Part 1 of this series we installed Virtual Box and Ubuntu Linux as the operating system for our development environment. In this session we’ll: Install Java Look at the foundation of a Java web app:...
View ArticleBuilding a Java EE Web app from scratch – Part 3 – Eclipse and Tomcat
Last time we created a simple static servlet by manually creating an HTML file, packaging it up into a war file, and copying the war file into the deployment directory of an Apache Tomcat instance. To...
View ArticleBuilding a Java EE Web app from scratch – Part 4 – Hello World Servlet
Creating a Servlet To create a servlet, we first need to create a new Eclipse project, within which the servlet will live. On the Eclipse menu, click File, New, Dynamic Web Project. Give the project a...
View ArticleUnit testing – Build up vs tear down approaches
Suppose we had to unit test the following method: public boolean result() { return a() && b() && c(); } There are a number of different approaches that could be used to test this...
View ArticleNew developers should build their own dev environment
When we add a new developer to the team, there are a couple ways to get them up and coding: hand them over a machine that is completely configured and set up, ready to go give them some instructions...
View ArticleMaximum Weight Bipartite Matching implementation in Java
It’s been too long, but I’ve finally contributed to an open source project again. A number of years ago I implemented a polynomial-time algorithm for find the maximum weight matching of a bipartite...
View ArticleHow to set up Email notification workflow in Google Apps Spreadsheets
I often use Google Apps Spreadsheets for collaboration on a document with others. I created a simple custom function that will email me any time someone opens (or alternatively, edits) the spreadsheet,...
View ArticleA simple shared TODO list with daily email summaries in Google Apps
Last time I gave an example of email notification workflows using Google Apps. This time we’ll extend the email sending capability of Google Apps with another real-life example: a shared Google docs...
View ArticleWebsite scraping with a Google Spreadsheet
In a recent project, a client was doing some market research. They had a (long!) list of website URLs, and needed to get all email addresses displayed anywhere on the page of each of the sites. I...
View ArticleAdding Facebook Login to Google Docs Forms – Part 1
Google Forms are a great, capable tool. They are quick to create, and are used for a number of purposes such as surveys and polls. They are limited, however, in how much customization can be done....
View ArticleAdding Facebook Login to Google Docs Forms – Part 2
In my last article, I gave an outline of how we can enhance a Google form with a Facebook login. The steps were as follows: Create a Google form as usual Create a plain, empty html file on a web…...
View ArticleAdding Facebook Login to Google Docs Forms – Part 3
Next up is actually adding the Facebook Login widget to the page. The code for this is fairly lengthy, so I’ll highlight the steps and basic strategy (if you just want to try it out, check out...
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