Web Servers

(Note that my internet is not title cased, it's just a thing, not a person, and should receive no special treatment.) Two servers dominate the internet:

IIS on Windows

Apache on Windows and everything else

Apache has the largest percentage of servers

Both have similarities

Filters the Apache API finally gives us a robust method for filtering at different layers in the stack, and is similar to IIS's ISAPI.

MSDN Article on ISAPI filters here

APACHE API information here

Archimedes Spiral
http://home.att.net/~numericana/answer/curve.htm#archspir

Standards

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol (rfc 2616)
HTML 4.01 Specification
XHTML™ 1.0 The Extensible HyperText Markup Language
CSS Specifications Style Sheets
Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) Project
Cookies from the IETF help yourself!

WSDLPULL

http://wsdlpull.sourceforge.net/

wsdlpull is a C++ web services client library. It includes a WSDL Parser,a XML Schema parser and validator and an XML Parser and serializer.
...
wsdlpull uses the xml pull api to parse a WSDL1.1 document. This makes wsdlpull highly efficient which is why you can process and invoke a WSDL in no time.
The Web service Invocation API allows you to dynamically inspect and invoke a web service. Unlike other toolkits there is no need to generate stubs or type serializers.
You can use the dynamic invocation API to write your own web service clients in one step. Writing a web service client involves providing the WSDL URL,setting the operation,the input types and getting back the results. No knowledge of SOAP is needed to write a web service client using wsdlpull. The invocation API is quite protocol independent and focusses on presenting a simple and intutive interface and abstracts away protocol specific details.

References

Aesthetics, Style

RGB to CMYK and other conversions
I am going to have some rather advanced color selection tools here, which are currently about half developed. They use some the algorithms from this site (among others.) (The hard one was color-saturation-value CSV, due to it's lack of dimensional orthoganality. I'll use CSV for my color model space. CSV is too useful to do without!)

Style from the W3
Just a lot of common sense!

Web Style Guide
You can take some of this with a grain of salt, but it encapsulates the prevailing wisdom in one site.
On Page Dimension from the Guide...

"The graphic safe area dimensions for printing layouts and for page layouts designed to use the maximum width of 800 x 600 screens are shown below:

Graphic "safe area" dimensions for layouts designed to print well:
Maximum width = 560 pixels
Maximum height = 410 pixels (visible without scrolling)

Graphic "safe area" dimensions for layouts designed for 800 x 600 screens:
Maximum width = 760 pixels
Maximum height = 410 pixels (visible without scrolling)"

www.ShoreWalker.com - I agree with most everything David Walker has to say on this site. It's actually kind of spooky for me to see someone that thinks like I do on style issues.

JavaScript / DHTML / DOM

On inner browsing

Inner browsing was the old name. This concept has been re-monikered 'AJAX' for Asynchronous Javascript and XML. I will be providing some documantation on AJAX.

The Browser DOM...

There are now a set of standards that define an object model as an abstraction of the web browser and it's parts. This abstraction helps developers make the client browser an active part of the overall user interaction with a web site. It makes it easier to get by without a plugin or applet.

The problem is that MS Internet Explorer and Mozilla/Netscape adhere to the standard differently and have proprietary extensions. My openDom.js class helps.
More coming soon

C# - coming soon

Java

Java is still the #1 programming language of the web. It would be remiss for me not to have some information on it. I will be playing around with some client side Java for doing pie charts, and will publish the documentation here.

Highly Recomended Book Resources

Effective C++, Second Edition, by Scott Meyers

More Effective C++, by Scott Meyers

Scott Meyer's website contains links to many publications, presentations, books, and other information from Scott: http://www.aristeia.com/

Open Databases

On Linux, there are two open database platforms do almost anything you would ever want a database to do. Both are extremely reliable.

(The openData abstraction library available on this site provides a common interface to both of them, so you can switch from one to the other painlessly.)

Images

The Image Magic API is the easiest and most full featured library for manipulating images for resizing and filtering.
We use ImageMagick to automatically generate thumbnail images from the fullsize images as they're uploaded.

Example code:

      try 
      {          
        Image image; 
        // read the image in
        image.read(imgPath);
        // set the scaling geometry   
        Geometry geom( boundX, boundY );      
        // only scale images that are greater in size
        geom.greater(true);      
        // do not change the aspect ratio
        geom.aspect(false);            
        // use sampling method to resize
        image.sample(geom);      
        // write the small image out
        image.write(smlPath); 
      }
      catch( Exception &error_ )
      { 
        script << "Error creating thumbnail - Exception caught: " << error_.what() << endl;      
      }

Linux Reference

Systems Management

Building a web site from scratch? You need to know how to manage the Linux system.

Time

How to set your Linux computer's time to the Atomic Clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)...

Login as root or issue the su command.
Run the following command to set you system clock:
rdate -s time.nist.gov
Suse:
ntpdate time.nist.gov
Run the following command to synchronize your hardware clock with your system clock:
/usr/sbin/hwclock --systohc
Suse:
/sbin/hwclock --systohc
You may Verify correct time by going to the NIST Web Site.

Intalling Linux Fonts

See the article at www.myfonts.com

RPM References

Both are command line references ro Redhat Package Manager.

Recommendations

Server operating system (in order of preference): Linux, Free BSD, OSX, AIX, Solaris
Webserver: Apache (or Zeus for higher load traffic)
Databases (no real order of preference): MySQL, PostgreSQL, DB2, Sybase, Oracle
Server code development language (in order of preference): C++, Java, C# ASP.NET, PERL, PHP
Client code development language: ECMA (Java)script, Java, (C# is under evaluation)
Authentication, Site Certificates:

For information on my book
Detecting the World: Capturing Physical Measurements with C++
click here

Simple steps for creating an autorun CD-ROM
The best material for Windows is on the Microsoft site.

Favicon.ico?

Favicon.ico itself is a 16x16 bitmap stored in legacy Microsoft icon resource file. Actually, it is very easy to generate favicon.ico from an existing image file using ImageMagick. Since almost all Linux distributions install ImageMagick by default, all you need to generate your own favicon.ico is a shell access to a Linux box. Root access or physical access to the box is not required. Regular user privilege suffices. No need to use fancy graphical editor like Adobe Photoshop or The Gimp.

Suppose you have an image named picture.png. To convert it into favicon.ico all you need to do is to execute the following command:

convert picture.png -resize 16x16! favicon.ico

That’s it. No fuss, no muss. Any experienced PHP/Perl/Python coder can use the above oneliner to easily create their own aforementioned web based favicon.ico generator.

debugging https

Issue the following to start a debug session with the https server:
openssl s_client -connect www.XYX.com:443 -state -debug

If it hangs, do a netstat in another session on the client you issued the command from to see how far you got with the protocal before it got stuck. That should prove illuminating.

Reference Library

Internal and external resource for web development.

The Apache Web Server

Links