Webapplication

Display pdf document in an more pleasant way

I had an pdf with about 1000 Sites consisting only of tables. To navigate and find something in this Document wasn’t that easy. This leads me to develop a web application that should represent the data in a more pleasant way. First I had to analyze the PDF Document, there are several different pdf versions and standards, the second thing that have to be checks is the structure of the document. For example the document could consists of only pictures, which would make the task harder, since there is no text. In my case the pdf structure was straight forward and consists of text boxes. The parser was based on the the PDFClown library which is written in c#. After the parsers was written and able to parse the document, the data was stored in an SQL database. For the basis of the web frontend Umbraco was used. It’s a cms that is based on asp.net.

Use del.icio.us to save links

Del.icio.us is a good platform to save and share links to internet resources. If you are interested in a certain link, but don't want to look at it immediately, you can safe it in del.icio.us and tag it with a specific tag, e.g. "toRead". Later, you can have a look at all those links.

Additionally, I use the del.icio.us plugin for firefox which makes life a lot easier (especially the tagging, because popular tags are proposed).

Use Dolphin on Mac OSX – Solution

I think there does not exist a perfect solution right now. It is possible to get most parts of Dolphin running (including the Ajax requests with some minor modifications), but there do still exist some graphical problems. It seems that the problem is not only caused by Dolphin but also by the used gd-library. Actually I was only able to try it with Mac OS 10.4 and I am not sure if the newer versions (10.5) are providing better support for this functionality.

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Enhancing User Interactions by using AJAX

"A" technology named Ajax is capable to enhance user interactions - it's
the short form of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, so it's an incorpotation several technlogies, which are quite common and not that knew.
The "key part" is the Ajax engine between server and client. By introducing this engine the start-stop-start-stop nature of interacting with traditional websites is broken. This former is responsible for two major-task: • communicating with the server asynchronously • rendering the front end.

To provide an asynchronous communication between server and client, the descent of data needs to be bunched. In contrast to traditional webapps,
Furthermore, it's closing the gap between Desktop Apps and WebApps, enabling a more and more desktop-like experience.

A simple contact formular provided by artmedic

Artmedic provides lots of freeware php scripts on their website http://www.artmedic-phpscripts.de/. The script kontaktformular can be used to provide contact means to website users. It is a simple php script with an installation routine. Although this script is very simple, it has some securtiy features and was tested and is still maintained.

Although it is very simply to build such a script on your own, it is easier and more secure to take an existing script.

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A simple course registration system based on PHP/Mysql

I evaluated a lot of different open-source course registration systems available on the internet. Unfortunately, most of these systems offer a lot of functionality, but are not very easy to use and integrate. The aim was to keep the maintaince and integration effort low, so I decided to program a solution on my own.

The solution uses the layout used by the webpage (www.discovery.jku.at), and it consists of a few php scripts, which use the existing mysql database (separate tables are used to store the data). Users can register using their name and email address for one or more courses. Registration details can be changed later using a link provided per email. The Number of participants to some courses can be limited; registration works on a first come first served basis.

Although I usually prefer to use existing solutions, this would have taken a lot of effort to integrate and maintain an existing system. In addition, existing solutions provide lots of functionality I did not need in this specific case (e.g. ticketing, payment, ...). Therefore, a small own solution (loc < 500) was the best way.

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Ruby On Rails Pagination

Hi TU Techies! I´m currently working on my first Ruby On Rails applikation. A part of this app is an adress-management userinterface. As the app manages a great amount of adresses there is a search page in the app. I want to display the search results with a google like pagintor. But I don´t really how. Pleas help me!

Providing contact to website users

How to provide the possiblity to contact a certain entity is difficult for many companies and organizations. Especially for small NGOs, it is not possible to have a big mailing infrastructure and to maintain server-side spam filtering. Therefore, email addresses should not be published as plaintext. Nevertheless, the website of the NGO should somehow offer the possibility to contact the NGO. It is important that the technology used is widespread and cheap, since NGOs do not have a large amount of money to spend on specialized technology. If possible, open source software should be used. As the existing infrastructure (apache server, msql server) is offered for free, it should be used to solve this problem. The only important thing is that spamming should not be possible and the tool should guarantee that a human being is trying to make contact, not an (evil) software program.

Managing courses and providing a registration System

The registration system should offer a specified number of courses and a limited number of possible registrations. The system has to ensure that no further registrations are possible if the places are limited. It should be possible to integrate the system into an existing website, including adaptions concerning layout and design. The registration process is limited to a specific time and registered users should be able to change their registrations. The users should be able to log on and view as well as change their current registrations. The backend should provide facilities to add and remove users and should offer registration lists which could be used to check attendance. In addition, collected e-mail addresses could be used to inform audience on time or location change. The technology used should be widespread and easy to use. It should be used for a Website for company fairs (www.discovery.jku.at) and is therefore used only occasionally. It is of major importance that the system is easy to use and to maintain because the organizing team of the fair and also the maintaining team of the website change a lot. The existing infrastructure is an Apache server and a mysql database which ideally should be used for this project as well. Nevertheless, other open source technologies could be integrated.

Cheap Yet Secure Daily Backups For Database And Files

I need to make backups of a webapplication's MySQL database and some files for a client. Backups should be done on a daily basis and the whole system should be as cheap as possible - "ok, backups are important, but I don't want to spend any money on it anyway...". The backup should be fully automated. Furthermore installing an FTP server on one of the client's local machines (to upload the backups there) is not wanted, due to security concerns. Generally nothing of the existing setup should be changed, if possible. Finally security is a major concern - the backups' content is sensitive so making the data publicly available is nearly as bad as losing it.

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