JavaOne 2008 is starting in couple of hours. I will be there all four days soaking in all the knowledge, fun and sharing about it in this blog.

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Selenium Remote Control (RC) is a test tool that allows you to write automated web application UI tests in many programming languages against any HTTP website using any mainstream JavaScript-enabled browser. Selenium RC is a powerful and simple framework for running (scheduled or manually) automated UI centric regression tests for web applications / services. Here are few simple tips for Selenium RC java client. I used JUnit for tests. You can use NGUnit too.

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Communication between Java applets has been an interesting topic from the early days of Java. There are several esoteric ways to communicate like using Javascript as a bridge. However we will look into the simplest and most reliable method of intra-applet communication.

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I have tried several HTML Editors over the years. One of the earliest WYSIWYG HTML editor I used was Netscape Gold / Composer, which was quite basic but probably the only one at that time (1995). For quite sometime after that I used Visual Page, even when the product was discontinued because of its simplicity and ease of use. I graduated on to Dream Weaver. Anyway back to the present when I moved to Linux, I was looking for a high quality HTML editor to be a replacement of DreamWeaver on Linux platform. I was looking for an editor with WYSIWYG capability with modern CSS based layouts. I needed something light-weight and yet with well rounded features. Syntax highlighting was a nicety but not necessity.

I tried several editors including but not limited to SciTe Text Editor, Nvu, Bluefish Editor, XEmacs Text Editor, KompoZer & Quanta Plus. Here is a brief overview of each followed by my recommendation.
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ExtJS ComboBox doesn’t advertise, in its documentation, any way to get the selected index of a ComboBox. Looking at the code I realized we can use the undocumented property selectedIndex. However there is a catch.

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In ExtJS you can create ComboBox which loads data from the server. You can also code so that new data is loaded from the server in response to an event like changing selection of another ComboBox. However it also means that the filtering is done remotely which is slow.

In ExtJS ComboBox automatic filtering is a nifty capability where the ComboBox items are automatically filtered to show only the values which matches the text you typed so far. It can also auto-fill the rest for you. This powerful capability comes at a price for remote mode. Every time the data is filtered by sending a query to the server which can be slower than local query.

In many use cases the full data is already on the client side, fetched during the initial loading of the ComboBox. Subsequent filtering can be easily done on the client side. Let’s see how we can solve it.

Update: I have also filed a defect in ExtJS forum to hopefully incorporate the functionality in the core with suggested solutions. The defect details has been provided at the end of this post.
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Simple things should be simple. While starting with ExtJS, I saw a screencast on Grid which used a rather dubious method of making an AJAX call using an actual form element. I hunted for a better option and I came across a better option - Ext.data.Connection. Here’s an working example on how you can easily make AJAX call in ExtJS library.

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Trim is a useful function available in languages like Java & PHP which removes the leading and traling whitespace(s) from a String. Unfortunately Javascript doesn’t natively provide trim functionality to the String object. Fortunately there is a simple solution. Place the following code near the top of your Javascript file (or inline script) to add trim() functionality to all String objects.
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After much debugging I realized that in creating dialogs using Ext.LayoutDialog class of ExtJS library we must specify the configuration for east, west, north and south properties, as required, in the LayoutDialog config (see below for more requirements, details and a working example). This should be done before you add the content panels to the layout of the dialog. Otherwise you will get some really hard to debug errors.

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This is a sporadic error that I have seen in Firefox browsers while using the Ext JS components. It is not harmful in any way but is annoying. It is filed as a Firefox defect and has been fixed for 3.0a5pre. In the earlier version here is how you can fix it for Firefox.

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