Build and deploy web applications

Now that Stephanie is not in the office anymore, I have taken over the responsibility of building and deploying new production versions of our web applications. To build, I run Ant scripts and then use Eclipse to package the application into a war file. I have not written an Ant script from scratch myself, but I have had to become somewhat familiar with Ant in order to track down problems during builds. In order to deploy the application to the server (a Sun server) I have had to become familiar with telnet, ftp, and basic commands in Solaris.

ESIWEB admin tools

I added a new administrative tool to the employee section of the ESIWEB application. This tool gives an admin user the capability to add a new Work Ethic Award winner, or edit an existing winner. The tool retrieves all existing winner information saved in the CMS and creates an array of beans representing the data. The JSP page uses the array to display a list of winners. The user can select an existing winner to edit his/her information, or click a link to add a new winner. Form submissions go to a servlet which handles updating an existing winner's node in CMS, or adding a new node if a new winner was added. The winner information includes text properties, such as date and description, and a picture of the winner. The html form uses a content type of multipart so the user can upload an image.

More Dynamic Forms

I expanded the Dynamic Forms Edit tool to add a capability for a user to define certain form elements as linked so that, depending on the user's answer to a question, other form elements are either displayed or hidden. The tool lets the user define which elements are linked to a particular question, and whether or not to show or hide each linked element for each possible answer to the question. When the form is saved, this information is converted to an XML string representation of the link details and saved as a property of the question. When a user requests a particular form, the XML data is parsed and used to generate Javascript code to handle the display/hiding of linked elements. This generated Javascript is placed in the form header and a call to the generated function is placed in the question's onclick/onchange event handler.